A naturalistic investigation into the effectiveness of an attributional retraining programme for academic performance

The present study represents a naturalistic investigation into the effectiveness of an attributional retraining programme based on the reformulated learned helplessness model. The current study addressed several methodological issues by assessing attributions and performance outcome measures before and after retraining and employed a control and a placebo control group. A total of 134 students volunteered to participate in a series of workshops. The workshops were held over three consecutive days each week for a total of three weeks. Students attended either a placebo control workshop, an attributional retraining workshop in accord with the reformulated learned helplessness model (internal, stable and global information), or a stability retraining workshop.

The present study clearly indicates attributional retraining can successfully manipulate attributions. However, although the workshops successfully altered student’s attributions, there was no concomitant improvement in performance. As no significant differences were observed between the three workshop groups on any performance indicator, the superior performance relative to the control group may, in effect, be a consequence of increased self-efficacy and self-esteem obtained by simply attending workshops.