Attribution refers to the process that people analyze others' or their own behaviors, point out their essence or infer their reasons, that is, explain and infer the reasons for others' or their own behaviors.
Attribution is everywhere, whether it is talented psychologists or ordinary people. In teaching practice, each student will have different reasons for the success or failure of his studies. Attribution style of students will directly affect self-efficacy, achievement motivation and learning behavior, thus affecting academic performance. Therefore, teachers should pay attention to the art and methods of education in the teaching process, guide students to establish a positive attribution model, avoid students from having a sense of learned helplessness, and help students maintain a good sense of self-efficacy. This paper aims to analyze several attribution theories and explore their enlightenment to teaching practice.
First of all, several main attribution theories
(1) An overview of Heidegger's attribution theory.
Attribution theory was first put forward by f heider (1958) in interpersonal psychology. Therefore, Haider is the founder of attribution theory. He pointed out that the causes of human behavior can be divided into internal reasons and external reasons. Internal factors refer to the actors' own factors, such as needs, emotions, interests, attitudes, beliefs, efforts, etc. External factors refer to the factors in the actor's surrounding environment, such as others' expectations, rewards, punishments, instructions and orders, weather, the difficulty of work and so on. Hyde believes that attribution can be divided into two categories: one is situational attribution; The second is the attribution of personality tendency.
Hyde's attribution theory gives us the following enlightenment:
1, when a person succeeds, it should be attributed to his powerful ability, which can make him proud, confident in himself and brave to face difficulties, setbacks and failures.
When a person fails, he should be blamed for not working hard enough, not incompetence. Because incompetence will hurt their self-esteem, they will feel ashamed, lack confidence in the future and ignore the role of hard work in success. Because he doesn't work hard, on the one hand, he can avoid hurting his self-esteem, on the other hand, he can feel that he is wrong and he is responsible. He can't blame the teacher, nor can he blame the examination questions for being too difficult. He will study harder in this way.
(2) Weiner's attribution effect theory.
American psychologist Bernard? Bernard Weiner (1974) proposed an attribution model centered on the cognitive components of successful or failed behaviors. He believes that the individual's explanation of success or failure is nothing more than the following four factors: (1) own ability; (2) the degree of effort; (3) the difficulty of the task; (4) Good or bad luck. Weiner divided these four factors into three dimensions to analyze, namely, the control source of the cause, the stability of the cause and the controllability of the cause.
Weiner attribution model
As can be seen from the table, Weiner described the "internal reasons" of personal characteristics with ability and effort; Difficulties and luck are "external causes" of environmental factors. Weiner also divided four reasons according to the dimension of "stability": ability and task difficulty are stable factors; The degree of effort and luck is unstable and varies greatly in various situations. He believes that the two dimensions of "internal and external locus of control" (internal and external factors) and "stability" are independent of each other and play different roles in the generation and quality of a person's achievement motivation. The dimension of "stability" has a great influence on the expectation or prediction of success in similar situations in the future. If someone attributes his success in a certain task to stable reasons, such as his strong ability or the task is easy for him, he will naturally expect himself to continue to succeed in similar situations in the future. If you attribute your success to unstable reasons that change with the situation, such as hard work or good luck, you are obviously not so sure about your next success. On the contrary, if the failure of a task is attributed to a stable reason that is difficult for individuals to change, such as poor ability or too difficult task, then it is obvious that similar tasks will fail in the future; If you attribute failure to unstable reasons, such as bad luck or not working hard enough, you will have higher expectations for future success.
The enlightenment of Weiner's attribution theory is that the attribution result will affect the individual's future achievement behavior, and attributing success or failure to internal/external or stable/unstable reasons will cause different emotional and cognitive reactions (pride or shame) of individuals. Attributing success to internal stability factors will make individuals proud and feel that their cleverness has achieved success; However, it will make individuals feel ashamed to attribute their failure to internal instability. Dwek (1975) found that students who attribute success to hard work last longer in their future work than those who attribute success to ability, and students who attribute failure to ability spend less time in their future work than those who attribute failure to hard work.
(3) Attribution theory of self-efficacy.
The theory of self-efficacy was first put forward by American psychologist A Bandura (1977), and later developed into the attribution theory of self-efficacy by cognitive psychologists. The so-called sense of self-efficacy refers to an individual's subjective evaluation of the effectiveness of completing an activity before action, which will have many influences on subsequent behavior.
1, A. Bandura believes that self-efficacy comes from "unconditional positive concern" or behavioral reinforcement, and the individual's self-efficacy determines his behavioral motivation in the achievement situation. When a person's behavior is always accompanied by success and the care and support of others, his sense of self-efficacy will be enhanced or improved, and his enthusiasm for this behavior will be correspondingly improved; When a person's behavior is always accompanied by failure and criticism from others, his sense of self-efficacy will weaken or decrease, and his enthusiasm for this behavior will also decline.
2. Recently, some researchers pointed out that people's sense of self-efficacy is also related to people's judgment of self-ability. It is largely determined by what people attribute to the results of previous activities and the evaluation of others. People have a high degree of self-awareness, rationality, self-evaluation and self-adjustment ability, and reinforcement has no effect on any behavior of people; People usually don't look at and evaluate themselves the way others look at and evaluate themselves, nor do they overestimate or underestimate their abilities without analysis because of the success or failure of several activities. With the end of a certain behavior, people often consciously or unconsciously infer the reasons for its success or failure. Only when success is attributed to the inherent and stable factor of outstanding ability will individuals have a higher sense of self-efficacy; Similarly, only when failure is attributed to an internal and stable factor, that is, lack of self-ability, will individuals have a low sense of self-efficacy. Individuals attribute success or failure to external and unstable factors such as luck and opportunity, and no matter how others evaluate it, it is not enough to shake or change his sense of self-efficacy.
At present, attribution is an important cognitive process and the basis for the generation and change of self-efficacy, which has become the consensus of researchers in this field, and attribution has therefore become the focus of research in this field. The author thinks that all human behaviors are the result of the interaction between subjective and objective. In the process of producing, maintaining and strengthening self-efficacy, as well as weakening or disappearing, positive attention and strengthening from outside play a certain role, especially for the achievement motivation and behavior of preschool children, early school students and middle school students, because their values are in an unformed or initial stage. For people with mature or basically stereotyped personality, attribution plays a decisive role in the generation, maintenance, enhancement or weakening and disappearance of their sense of self-efficacy, thus playing a decisive role in achievement motivation and achievement behavior.