In the initial phase of two complementary studies of the relation of persistence behavior to the causal perception of failure, temporal persistence and resistance to extinction were found to be positively related to the attribution of failure to insufficient effort and negatively related to attributions to ability and task difficulty by both male and female sixth graders. In Phase 2, the male pupils who least frequently attributed failure to lack of effort were randomly allocated to a control group or a social reinforcement group or a token plus social reinforcement attribution retraining group. At immediate and delayed posttests, experimental subjects attributed success and failure on the training task and two independent transfer tasks to effort significantly more than did controls. A significant increase from pretest levels on both persistence indexes paralleled the attributional change of experimental subjects. No difference was evident in the effectiveness of the two experimental treatments. Despite some attenuation on the transfer tasks, there was evidence of durability of training effects, and generalization of effects to an independent tester at a further 4-month follow-up posttest. The results provided strong support for the attribution model of achievement motivation and provide an empirical foundation for the rationale of attribution retraining programs.

The study of dispositional differences in self-attributions has important implications for educational settings, but critical issues have been largely ignored in much attributional research. The purposes of this study are to clarify the distinction between dispositional and situational approaches to attribution research, to review particular issues that are important for the study of individual differences in self-attributions, to examine these issues with respect to results from a new self-attribution measure, and to demonstrate how self-attributions are related to dimensions of self-concept. Conclusions based on the literature review and empirical findings both demonstrate that (a) individual differences in self-attributions cannot be explained in terms of the bipolar dimensions that have been found in research that manipulates situational components of the attribution process (e.g., the internal-external, stable-unstable, and controllable-uncontrollable dimensions), (b) attributions for success and failure outcomes differ in ways that have not been recognized by attributional theorists, and (c) ability attributions (but perhaps not attributions to effort and external causes) are specific to particular areas of academic content. The results also demonstrate a clear and predictable pattern of relationships between dimensions of self-attribution and self-concept that supports the convergent and discriminant validity of responses in each of these areas.

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Third-grade children of impulsive conceptual tempo observed sixth-grade models who showed differing patterns of reflective and/or impulsive response and experienced different reinforcement contingencies as they responded to items of a visual discrimination task. Boys and girls who observed a reflective model and girls who observed the contrasting patterns of two models or a model who changed her response pattern from impulsive to reflective showed increases in response latency in an immediate posttest. These increases were maintained over a 2%-week period only for girls who observed a model who changed in response pattern. Children who showed increased latencies in the immediate posttest made significantly fewer errors than those whose latencies did not change.

Most young children are exuberant and enthusiastic about their futures, believing they can do almost anything. But many eventually lose hope. Efforts to understand at what developmental point children lose hope is the focus of this paper. Students in grades 1 through 12 (N =990) who attend Catholic and public schools were administered the Children's Hope Scale or the Young Children's Hope Scale for the purpose of determining the relationship of the variables of age, ethnicity, and gender to hope as measured by those scales. Results show a significant difference in the levels of hope between Catholic and public school students, with Catholic school students scoring higher on total hope and on the agency sub scale. Other analyses suggest, however, that this difference may only hold for grades 1 through 5. No significant findings relation to the criterion variables were evident for the public school sample, but among Catholic students a significant main effect was found for ethnicity and age on total hope scores, with African American students reporting higher levels of overall hope than their Caucasian peers. Age also was a factor, with a steady decline evident in students' agency as they age. (RJM)