Empowering teachers by integrating inter- and intrapersonal attributional perspectives: How teachers’ attributions and responsibility shape their emotions and classroom interventions

Teachers' attributions for classroom outcomes—the underlying causes teachers perceive for these outcomes—and their judgments of responsibility affect teachers' emotions and intervention strategies in the classroom. However, attribution research has mainly focused on teachers' attributions and ascriptions of responsibility to students ; the role of teachers’ self-directed attributions and personal sense of responsibility remains relatively unexplored. Drawing on Weiner's attribution theory, two vignette studies examined the combined predictive effects of teachers' student- and self-directed attributions and responsibility judgments on their emotional reactions and classroom intervention strategies. Study 1 included 222 preservice and 132 in-service teachers. Study 2 included 179 preservice teachers. Study 1 was correlational, and Study 2 was an experiment. In Study 1, interindividual differences in teacher responsibility were the strongest unique predictor of their willingness to help failing students. In Study 2, preservice teachers were experimentally prompted to focus on their own versus the student's responsibility for student failure or assigned to a control condition. Focusing on their own responsibility led to greater sympathy with the failing student. Although willingness to help did not differ across groups, respondents' proposed help-giving strategies varied significantly. Focusing on teacher responsibility resulted in strategies that implied teaching adaptations. Focusing on student responsibility resulted in strategies that outsourced the problem to others. Empowering teachers as instructional designers requires systematic analyses of not only their beliefs about students but also their self-directed attributions, responsibility, emotions, and decision-making. Importantly, help-giving intentions did not automatically lead to effective intervention strategies. • Teacher responsibility predicts help-giving beyond student-related attributions. • Self-focused counterfactuals promote adaptive teaching strategies. • Student-focused counterfactuals lead to delegating responsibility to others. • Help-giving intent alone is insufficient to ensure effective instructional action.