Prolonged reading failure leads students to attribute failure to fixed low ability and define reading as a failure situation¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 1989 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 2 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Poor readers attribute failure to lack of a fixed ability and success to luck or task ease, eroding motivation and reducing effort across literacy events. → Walker 1989

Evidence¶

Walker 1989¶

Walker, B. J. (1989). The Interactive Model of Reading: Deciding How Disability Occurs. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED315726

q2 · i? · theoretical · r2

The review reports, citing Butkowsky and Willows (1980), an experimental study manipulating success and failure in reading with fifth graders. The paper argues repeated failure plus criticism fosters the belief that reading ability is fixed, decreasing motivation.

"Manipulating both success and failure in reading experiences, Butkowsky and Willows (1980) found that poor readers in the fifth grade were less likely to attribute success to ability, and more likely to attribute it to luck or task ease than were the better readers."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Academic Self-Concept — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Attributing repeated failure to lack of ability fosters learned helplessness, while external, unstable, specific attributions are adaptive — related
• Outcome-consistent task performances are attributed to stable factors and outcome-conflicting performances to unstable factors — related
• Praise for intelligence, rather than for effort, after success undermines children's motivation and performance after a later failure — related
• Learners' task-specific self-efficacy beliefs predict whether they initiate, persist through, and recover from difficulty on academic tasks. — related
• Learners invest more effort in tasks they perceive as interesting, personally important, or useful to their future goals. — related
• Frustration at not understanding a concept is perceived to motivate exploration and persistence, while frustration attributed to teachers or curriculum impairs motivation — related
• Praise for intelligence (person praise) induces a fixed mindset and helpless reactions compared with process praise — related
• Proximal goals and ability attributional feedback for early learning raise self-efficacy more than distant goals and effort feedback, by a review's report of earlier studies — related
• Self-handicapping decreases effort to protect self-worth, in contrast to defensive pessimism — related