The Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Learned
helpless students, perceive school failure as something that they will
never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as something
out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack of
control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The
way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the
classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).
Children
with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school failure to
momentary and specific circumstances; for example, “I just happened to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic
explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will always be present), global (the cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal
(they conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence
of the negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I
always fail no matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of
the event is positive, a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.
Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies
Due
to this perceived lack of control of the negative event, a learned
helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or help when he is having
difficulty performing an academic task. These children are ineffective
in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to engage in
strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example, learned
helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a
checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a
multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success
alone (e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to
ease the helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember
that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or
chance. According to Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to
persuade a learned helpless child that she can succeed, and asking her
just to try hard, will be ineffective if we do not teach the child
specific learning and compensatory strategies that she can apply to
improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The authors state
that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this
dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching
her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those
strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy
achievement problems; coupled with attribution retraining,
or creating and maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a
learned helpless child to use learning strategies, we are giving her the
tools she needs to develop and maintain the perception that she has the
resources to reverse failure. Ames (1990) recommends that, in
combination with the learning strategies, we help the learned helpless
child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I will make
drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the
child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to
experience progress toward her individualized goals.
Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases Skills
To
accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children recognize
and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have. In
addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is
incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills.
Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success as improvement;
that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and
skills we did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children
that, to succeed in school, they need to perform at a particular level,
or they need to perform at the same level than other students. When we
help children see success as improvement, states Tollefson, we are
encouraging them to expend effort to remediate their academic
difficulties. In addition, we are training them to focus on strategies
and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and achievement.
Concluding Comments
To
minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in children, we
need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach their
academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in
control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of
developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus
on the learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe
you can think of another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback
stays focused on the child’s effort and the learning strategies he or
she is using -within both the child’s control and modifiable. When
children themselves learn to focus on effort and strategies, they can
start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and responsible for
their own successes in school and in life.
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