Teachers' Reactions to Attributions of Ability and Effort and their Predictions of Students' Reactions

Daniel Bar-Tal*, Amiram Raviv, Alona Raviv, Ruth Levit

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Forty-eight elementary and high school teachers were presented with a questionnaire consisting of three parts. In Part I, the teachers received a description of eight different hypothetical stories about one of their students. In each story, the student's ability (high or low), exerted effort (high or low) and outcome (success or failure) were varied. Following each story, the teachers were asked to respond with the grade they would give, their appreciation, predicted students' appreciation, predicted student's satisfaction, and predicted student's willingness to resemble the described student. In Parts II and III, the teachers were asked whether their students would like to be perceived as having ability or as exerting effort. The results showed that teachers appreciate students' effort exertion and take into consideration, while giving grades, exertion of effort when a student with low ability fails or when a student with high ability succeeds. Also, teachers believe that students appreciate exertion of effort, especially in the case of failure, but believe that students prefer to be perceived as having high ability rather than exerting high effort. Elementary school teachers were more moderate with respect to the latter reaction. These findings were discussed in comparison to students' reactions.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)231-240
Number of pages10
JournalEducational Psychology
Volume1
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 1981

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