L06: Attributional Tendencies

“Other people’s successes tend to be attributed to situational factors and their failures to internal factors.”

The above statement may be true for a classroom. As teachers we need to be very careful with the attributions we make about our students. We can fall into the attributions tramp really easy. If we do not evaluate our feelings and bias about the Socio-Economic Status or culture of the ones we teach our classroom it’s at risk to become the ultimate fail attribution.

For example, we may attribute to external causes the F a student got, or we might attribute it to internal causes and we say “He/she deserves it because is lazy”. On the other hand, we may think a student with a perfect score of A’s got it because of external attributions “He did it just because his father hired him a tutor”.

We can’t say either of these attributions is correct. As Ivers reminded us “Every circumstance is different. You can't just use these culturally created attributions in a sweeping way to decide what your reality is, what your self-worth is, all that sort of thing”

The same with our students we can not allow culturally created attributions borrow our view, poor people are not always lazy and rich students are not always taking advantages. But again, the main principle here is that every situation is different, and because of that we need to allow ourselves to question whether the attributions is the right one or not.