Learning-disabled students received instructions about both summarization strategies and their personal beliefs about causality that were designed to improve reading comprehension. A sample of 75 upper elementary school students were assigned to four treatment groups. The main experimental condition received attributional retraining on paired-associate and sort-recall tasks (which were unrelated to the target comprehension tests), instructions on the use of a summarization strategy, attributional statements about the efficacy of the instructed strategy, and posttests by which we assessed reading skills and general attributional beliefs. Students in another experimental condition received an identical treatment package without prior attributional retraining on unrelated paired-associate and sort-recall tasks but with attributional statements embedded in the summarization strategy. Subjects in one control condition received strategy training (without attributional retraining), whereas those in the other received neither strategy nor attribution instructions. Results suggested that attributional training enhanced the maintenance of the summarization strategy and selectivity facilitated generalization. Domain-specific attributional beliefs seemed to provide important orientating and perseverating characteristics that enhanced goal-directed, strategic processing in learning-impaired students. In spite of performance improvements, however, long-standing, antecedent attributional beliefs were unaltered by program-specific attributional training.

This article reviews the literature on strategy acquisition, use, and transfer with mentally retarded and learning disabled students. A model of metacognition is presented that integrates three components—Specific Strategy Knowledge, Metamemory Acquisition Procedures, and General Strategy Knowledge (including beliefs about the causes of successful performance)—in an attempt to explain some of the causes of individual differences in strategy use among educationally handicapped students. Two recent studies are presented that show how the retraining of attributional beliefs can be combined with other aspects of metacognitive instruction to enhance strategy transfer. Finally, implications of reshaping self-attributions for educational practice are discussed.

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