In an effort to answer my question from my first blog entry (Are healthy motivation skills best taught by someone other than the classroom teacher in secondary schools?) I did some research. I mostly focused my research on attributional retraining. There was an abundance of information on AR that was in accordance with much of Alderman’s suggestions. I did find one particularly interesting article “Attributional Retraining” by Raymond Perry and Nathan Hall on education.com. The authors explain that attributional retraining (AR) is a motivational treatment developed in the latter half of the 20th century along with social cognition theories. In accordance with Alderman’s suggestions, attribution is most powerful when combined with cognitive strategy instruction. AR is linked to Weiner’s attribution theory that we have read in Midgley & Arunkumar’s article. Here is a link to the article by Perry and Hall:
http://www.education.com/reference/article/attributional-retraining/
In this article, Perry and Hall explain that in achievement settings, a variety of AR treatments have been implemented. These AR treatments vary in terms of content, delivery formats, and audience targets.
Content ranges from modifying attributions, to changing certain properties of those attributions. For example, AR may involve encouraging effort instead of ability as explanations of failure. Alderman explains that students who attribute success to effort are more likely to persist, and have higher achievement than those that attribute success to ability. Other AR treatments seek to increase controllability for negative experiences. According to Alderman, when students feel like events are external and success is largely a matter of luck or other factors, they are more likely to experience learned helplessness. These AR treatments center on shifting the individual’s focus from test difficulty and luck to effort and strategy.
Delivery formats also range in a variety of ways. Material may be video-taped, written, or structured lectures. The length may vary and the format may be individual or group. In typical AR experiments, individuals are encouraged to think about past performances, or receive feedback on a task, and then AR treatments are administered immediately thereafter.
Audience targets range in terms of age, demographic, and psycho-social variables. The AR treatments administered also vary in order to be appropriate for the target audience. As Alderman points out, young child have different motivation patterns than older, and students with low ability differ from those with high.
AR treatments have been delivered in classrooms. AR has been shown effective in improving academic motivation and performance in struggling students. AR methods can also reduce aggression and help learning disabled students. The authors argue that AR procedures promoting self-talk concerning adaptive attributions may be better than direct persuasion by the instructor. This offers some answer to my original question (who is in a better position to teach motivational strategies to students?). The authors explain; “Instructor-initiated AR in intact classrooms may be less effective than smaller experimenter-led sessions.” AR research in secondary classrooms has demonstrated that intensive, in-person AR programs can increase perceptions of control, persistence, and achievement. Computer-based AR can also be effective. Further, AR plays a critical role in resolving group discipline problems and helping students make career related plans and decisions. The authors go on to explain; “As most educators know, attribution exchanges commonly occur in the daily functioning of classrooms. However, these informal, spontaneous, and anecdotal attributional exchanges are rarely informed by scientific theory and evidence and too often involve the communication of maladaptive (uncontrollable/stable) attributions for failure. Such maladaptive attributional exchanges raise serious questions about the ethics of their use in teaching practices intended to foster motivation.”
It appears this research supports my hypothesis. In the secondary classroom, content area teachers are not in the best position to help students develop healthy attributional strategies. Instead, students should be taught by a specialist, in a small-group setting and these healthy strategies should be reinforced in the classroom. It would be so beneficial for my students to have “Motivation 101” during their freshman year: Especially the at-risk students. When there is so much going on in our 35+ student urban public school classrooms, it can be difficult to spend time allowing students to create attributional styles. Instead, these strategies should be taught and monitored by scientific, trained individuals outside of the content classroom.
Finally, the authors make important suggestions should AR have to be implemented in the classroom. The authors give four guidelines. First, attributional content should be strongly informed by scientific evidence and reviewed by responsible professionals. This is definitely not happening at my school, nor at any of the other DPS schools I have visited. Second, screening procedures should be utilized to identify students that would benefit from AR. Again, this is not happening at the secondary level. Students are identified for special ed, special service, ELA, free-lunch, emotional disabilities, but not for attributional patterns. Third, the intervention format should be based on the needs for that specific population. This is important because often gifted and talented students get overlooked in low-performing, low-SES schools like the one I teach in. Our top students could benefit immensely from AR, but certainly not from the same AR program as lower-ability students. Fourth, follow-up assessments of subjective and objective outcomes should be required to document the effectiveness of the AR and adjust it accordingly. Just like effective instruction, AR needs to be carefully tracked and adjusted to meet the growth and develop of the students.
The research I did on AR has extremely important applications for my profession. I am going to suggest to our advisory coordinator that we rethink the curriculum of advisory and look for scientific-based AR or other motivation-retraining programs to incorporate in our high school curriculum. As an innovation school in DPS, we have a lot of freedom to try new things and figure out what works best for our population. Perhaps if AR is successful, at least for some students, it can begin to be a part of the curriculum learned by all DPS students.
