Goal setting and personal responsibility training for LD adolescents

Abstract

A training program designed to teach Learning Disabled junior high school students to set realistic achievement goals, to expend effort to reach the goals, and to accept personal responsibility for achievement outcomes was conducted with 61 LD adolescents attending four junior high schools. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. Goal setting strategies and effort attribution training were introduced for a six-week period. Pre-to posttesting indicated that the experimental group learned to set realistic goals and to attribute achievement outcomes to the amount of personal effort expended.Learning disabled (LD) adolescents have a history of school failure that may be attributed in part to poor study skills and low achievement motivation (Deshler, 1978; Rosenthal, 1973). Ross (1976) and Torgesen (1977) characterize the LD student as possessing poorly developed planning and organizational skills. Hallahan, Gajar, Cohen, and Tarver (1978) describe the LD student as inefficient in problem solving. Harway (1962) and Tollefson, Tracy, Johnsen, Buenning, Farmer, and Bark6 (1979Bark6 ( , 1982 depict the LD adolescent as lacking goal-setting skills and the ability to use past performance as a predictor of future performance. These researchers all suggest that LD adolescents are severely hindered in academic tasks by low motivation and lack of planning skills.While poor study and self-regulatory skills occur with some frequency across groups of LD and nonLD students, epidemiology studies conducted at the Institute for Research on Learning Disabilities at Kansas University suggest that poor study skills are factors that distinguish LD from nonLD students Deshler, Alley, Mellard, & Warner, 1980). These researchers found that a lack of selfmanagement skills was more frequently cited as a problem for LD students than for other groups of students with learning problems or for normal children.Recent studies also suggest that LD students express greater dissatisfaction with their school experiences than do nonLD students. An epidemiological study of 234 LD adolescents in grades 7 through 12 revealed that 17% of the sample found school dissatisfying to some degree (Deshler, Schumaker, Alley, Warner, & Clark, 1980). When queried about the causes of their dissatisfaction, 53% of this subgroup reported that their unhappiness arose from their lack of ability to do school work. Only 11% of a normally achieving control group used ability attributions to explain their dissatisfaction with school. In addition, 19% of these LD students, as contrasted with 7% of the control subjects, indicated that the difficulty of school tasks was a cause of unhappiness with school. The exploration of these attributions suggests that LD students who feel dissatisfied with school perceive it as a difficult environment where their discrepant school performance is related primarily to deficiencies in cognitive abilities.

Learning Goals and Progress Feedback during Reading Comprehension Instruction

“…When individuals make a commitment to attempt to attain a designated standard, they are likely to sustain their efforts until they achieve that standard. Given that children are limited in their capacity to cognitively represent complex goals in thought, short-term goals that incorporate specific performance standards lead to higher performance than do temporally distant goals, general goals (e.g., "Do your best"), or no goals (Bandura & Schunk, 1981;Schunk, 1989Schunk, , 1990Tollefson, Tracy, Johnsen, Farmer, & Buenning, 1984).…”

Teachers' attributions for students' low achievement: A validation of cooper and good's attributional categories

“…Much has been written about the affective consequences of expending effort and failing (Covington & Omelich, 1979;Tollefson, 1986). It appears that when teachers and students with low achievement interact, they may both be acting in ways that protect their self-esteem.…”

Self-Efficacy for Reading and Writing: Influence of Modeling, Goal Setting, and Self-Evaluation

“…Although Gaa had researchers hold conferences with children, they easily can be done by teachers. Tollefson, Tracy, Johnsen, Farmer, & Buenning (1984) taught goal setting to junior high school students with learning disabilities. Each week for four weeks students selected moderately difficult spelling words.…”