Effects of Effort Attributional Feedback on Children's Perceived Self-Efficacy and Achievement

This experiment tested the hypothesis that effort attributional feedback concerning past accomplishments promotes percepts of self-efficacy and mathematical achievement. Children who lacked subtraction skills received didactic training in subtraction operations with effort attributional feedback concerning past achievement, with feedback concerning future achievement, or with no feedback. Results showed that attributional feedback for past achievement led to more rapid progress in mastering subtraction operations, greater skill development, and higher percepts of self-efficacy. Results of a multiple regression analysis showed that percepts of efficacy and training progress each accounted for a significant increment in the explained portion of variability in posttest skill. This study helps to clarify the role of effort attributional feedback in achievement contexts. Article: Attributional theories postulate that individuals use information to arrive at causal ascriptions for achievement outcomes in terms of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck (Heider, 1958; Weiner, 1979; Weiner et al., 1971). The role of effort has received considerable attention, in part because unlike ability, task difficulty, or luck, effort is under volitional control and is amenable to change. For example, ascribing past failures to low effort is hypothesized to have motivational effects. When persons believe that increased effort will produce success they should persist longer at the task and thereby increase the level of their performance (Weiner, 1977, 1979; Weiner et al., 1971). Along these lines, attribution retraining programs in the area of achievement behavior often concentrate on changing children's causal ascriptions of failure to a lack of effort (Andrews & Debus, 1978; Dweck, 1975). In Dweck's (1975) study, for example, children identified as learned helpless solved arithmetic problems over trials and either always succeeded or occasionally failed to solve the criterion number. Subjects who failed were given effort attributional feedback by being told that they should have tried harder. Following training, children who had received the attributional feedback maintained or improved their performances after failure, whereas the performances of children who had always succeeded became poorer. The purpose of the present study was to determine the effects of effort attributional feedback given in the context of competency development on children's percepts of self-efficacy and achievement. The conceptual focus was Bandura's theory of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 1981). According to this theory, different influences change behavior in part by strengthening perceived self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is concerned with judgments about how well one can organize and execute courses of action required in situations that may contain ambiguous, unpredictable, and stressful elements. Percepts of efficacy can affect choice of activities, effort expended, and perseverance in the face of difficulties. Efficacy information can be conveyed through enactive attainments, socially comparative vicarious measures, social persuasion, and inferences from physiological arousal. Efficacy appraisal is an inferential process that involves weighting the relative contribution of ability and nonability factors. Many factors other than ability can affect performance, such as the difficulty of the task, effort expended, amount of external aid received, situational circumstances under which the performance occurs, and temporal pattern of successes and failures. In cognitive appraisals of effort expended, success achieved with minimal effort fosters the perception of high ability, whereas the same performance achieved after expending great effort connotes lower ability and will have less of an impact on increases in perceived efficacy. Persons who periodically fail but show improvement over time are more likely to raise their percepts of efficacy than people who succeed but see their performance level off compared with their previous improvement (Bandura, 1981). Research conducted within the attributional framework has investigated how the attributions people form to explain their behavior affect subsequent performance. In the self-efficacy analysis, attributional variables are viewed as conveyors of efficacy information. They influence performance mainly through their intervening effects on perceived efficacy, such as when persons infer their efficacy from effort expended and perceived task difficulty. In this conception, effort attributional feedback constitutes a socially persuasive means of conveying efficacy information; that is, to be told that one can achieve results through hard work implies that one possesses the efficaciousness to do so. This connotation should especially affect young children, who tend to view outcomes as highly dependent on effort and often equate effort with ability (Harari & Covington, 1981; Kun, 1977; Nicholls, 1979). However, the context in which the attributional feedback is provided can convey markedly different efficacy information. Children can be told that their past achievement was due to effort or that their future achievement will occur if they work hard. In the present study, children who lacked subtraction skills worked on a training packet that provided instruction and practice opportunities. One group of children was periodically monitored and received effort attributional feedback for their past progress by being told that they had been working hard. A second group received feedback for their future achievement by being told that, they needed to work hard. A third group was monitored in the same fashion as the feedback groups but received no attributional feedback. A fourth group received the training but was not monitored. Although both forms of attributional feedback have been used in concert in previous research, their implications may differ (Chapin & Dyck, 1976; Schunk, 1981). As children solve problems, they observe their progress and begin to develop a sense of efficacy. Telling them that effort was the reason for their progress should support their perceptions of their progress and should convey the idea that they can actualize their capabilities through effort. This approach promotes percepts of efficacy, task progress, and skill development. On the other hand, when they are told that they need to work hard, they may believe that they are not doing well—especially when they are given no normative information on how well other children did, which was the case in the present study. They may conclude that they are not as efficacious at the task despite their progress and may have little reason to believe that more effort is going to produce better results in the future. In summary, it was hypothesized that providing effort attributional feedback for past achievement (past attribution) would be most effective in promoting children's percepts of self-efficacy and achievement. In contrast, providing effort attributional feedback for future accomplishment (future attribution) was not expected to promote these outcomes over that expected as a function of merely providing training.