ABSTRACT

Teachers' responses to their own expectations for their pupils were classified as either administrative or interactional in nature. Bernard Weiner has taken one of the prevalent theoretical models of achievement motivation and applied to it the basic ideas in attribution theory. Weiner's initial concern was to examine the way in which the causal attributions made for instances of success and failure might affect the expectations for future success and the value placed on those successes by any one individual person. In his most recent formulation of the attributional theory of achievement related behaviour, Weiner puts forward three dimensions of causal factors as being of particular significance. The first of these is the internality dimension. The second dimension is that of stability. The third dimension discussed by Weiner in his 1979 paper is that of controllability. This chapter discusses the possible influences of classroom-based factors upon the attributions made by any one pupil.