Improving the Performance of Failing Students by Overcoming Their Self-Serving Attributional Biases

The causal impact of attributions on academic performance was examined by changing low-scoring students ' attributions regarding their poor performances. Initially, when students who were failing a college course identified the cause of the performance, they emphasized external, uncontrollable causes. Because these self-serving attributions could have perpetuated poor performance on subsequent examinations, students in the experimental condition were exposed to information that suggested that grades in college are caused by internal, con-trollable factors such as effort and motivation. As predicted, on subsequent tests and on the final examination, these students earned higher grades than control students who received no attributional information. These findings lend support to an attributional model of academic achievement and also sug-gest that educational interventions that shift attributions away from a self-serving pattern to a performance-facilitating pattern may improve academic outcomes. When people describe the causes of their successes and failures, they gener-ally blame their failures on inhibiting external factors, whereas they attribute their successes to the causal impact of internal factors. This pattern, vari-ously termed beneffectance (Greenwald, 1980), egocentrism (Forsyth & Schlenker, 1977), and egotism (Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfield, 1978), has been documented in a number of studies of students ' attributions about their