LD and Normal Adolescents' Causal Attributions of Success and Failure at Different Levels of Task Difficulty

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate learning disabled and normal adolescents' causal attributions of success and failure performances on various levels of task difficulty (easy, moderate, difficult). The results indicated that the students' perceptions of the task difficulty levels was a significant determinant of the two groups' differing causal attributions; locus of control was inadequate for explaining the differences in attribution ascribed by the two groups. In many respects, the learning disabled students' causal ascriptions for performance outcomes were similar to those of students classified as failure oriented.