Children's Beliefs in Their Own Control of Reinforcements in Inteuectual-Academic Achievement Situations

This study describes a scale for assessing children's beliefs that they, rather than other people, are responsible for their intellectual-academic successes and failures. Subscale scores assessing responsibility for successes and for failures were generally independent of each other. Split-half and test-retest reliabilities were moderately high. Normative data on 923 Ss in grades 3-12 indicate that self-responsibility is already established by third grade, that older girls give more self-responsible answers than older boys, and that slight but significant age changes occur in subscale scores dependent upon the sex of the child. Responsibility scores were moderately related to intelligence, ordinal position, and size of family, and inconsistently related to social class. Evidence of prediction to intellectual-achievement performance is presented.