Improving Motivation Through Dialogue

People continually seek explanations for their successes and failures so that they can predict and control the events that affect their daily lives (Weiner, 1986). These explanations reflect people's convictions about the extent to which their own efforts can help them achieve desirable outcomes.

Studies of students' causal attributions—their explanations for success or failure—show that successful students tend to attribute their successes to internal factors, such as effort (which they can control) and ability (which is beyond their control), and their failures to external factors, such as bad luck, a difficult test question, or a teacher's grading error. Their conviction that effort brings about success leads them to exert more effort when they encounter a learning challenge (Dweck, 1986; Forsterling, 1985).