Secondary School Students’ Causal Attribution of Success And Failure in Mathematics

Abstract

Just reacting to the events that happen to him/her is not enough to please the human being. Beyond that, what makes him/her happy is to understand why the events come to the scene and why other people behave differently in the face of the same events. The attribution theory is concerned with why one investigates the causes of one's own and others' behaviour, the diversity of the attributed causes, and the effects of these attributions on one's feelings, motivations and future behaviours. Literature in the field of attribution theory suggests a relationship between the way students explain the causes of their academic performance and academic achievement.

The aim of this research was to reveal 8th grade students’ causal attributions for success and failure in mathematics. The research group was comprised of 15 eighth grade students. A semi-structured interview form consisting of 8 open-ended questions was used to gather data. Each interviews were tape-recorded and lasted about 10-15 minutes. All registered data were transcribed, and analysed by using the content analysis method.

The results of the study revealed that the participated students explained being successful in mathematics with hard work, well listening to the lesson, and having mathematical ability. Moreover, there were the students who attributed their failures to reasons such as not accepting teacher’s teaching style, considering mathematics as difficult, and having prejudgment to mathematics. The fact that there are many formulas in mathematics, and that it is hard to memorize them was a failure cause in mathematics for some students.