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When Children Fail in School: What Teachers and Parents Need to Know About Learned Helplessness
- 1. WHEN CHILDREN FAIL IN SCHOOL WHAT TEACHERS AND PARENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LEARNED HELPLESSNESS A Psychoeducation forTeachers Skill-Building Guide
- 2. Background Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.” On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties. Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless response style.
- 3. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which leads to more school failure.This pattern of giving up when facing difficult tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her academic difficulties.
- 4. Learned helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many students with a learning disability. In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s feeling of being helpless.
- 5. Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students Some characteristics of learned helpless children are… Low motivation to learn, and diminished aspirations to succeed in school. Low outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g., bad grades). In addition, they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome. Lack of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events; one’s own actions cannot lead to success. Lack of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy expectations).These children believe that their school difficulties are caused by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even when they have adequate ability and normal intelligence.They are convinced that they are unable to perform the required actions to achieve a positive outcome.
- 6. They underestimate their performance when they do well in school, attributing success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was lucky that this test was easy.” They generalize from one failure situation or negative experience to other situations where control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless of their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time. They focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and skills. Because they feel incapable of implementing the necessary courses of action, they develop passivity and their school performance deteriorates.
- 7. 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, believing that they are capable of achieving in school, and other children develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).
- 8. 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 fully 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.
- 9. 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 instance, 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.
- 10. With learned helpless children, success alone (e.g., solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease their helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these children attribute their specific successes to luck or to 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 explicitly teaching when she can use those strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement problems.This should be coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and maintaining a success expectation.
- 11. 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.
- 12. 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, statesTollefson, 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.
- 13. 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 –both within the child’s control and both 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.
- 14. References (Part 1) 1. Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation:What teachers need to know. Teachers College Record.Vol. 91, No. 3, pp. 409-421. 2. Eccles, S.,Wigfield,A., and Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology.Vol. 3 (5th ed., pp. 1017-1095). NewYork:Wiley. 3. Seligman, M. E., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., & Gillham, J. (1995). The optimistic child. NewYork: Houghton Mifflin. 4. Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications of cognitive theories of motivation. Educational Psychology Review,Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 63-83.
- 16. Background Information Learned helplessness is a dysfunctional condition that keeps students’ self-confidence extremely low and perpetuates their perception that they are not able to cope successfully with academic demands and school challenges. Sutherland and Singh (2004) state that learned helplessness contributes to the school failure that many students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders experience.The authors add that, the kind of school failure experienced by children with a learning disability –over long periods and across a variety of tasks, settings, and teachers- puts LD students at risk of developing learned helplessness. According to Burhans and Dweck (1995), children prone to helpless behavior patterns in the classroom are more likely to avoid the possibility of academic failure than to increase their effort in achieving academic success.
- 17. Without a healthy self-confidence, learned helpless students give up academically, because they do not expect to be successful in school and they anticipate failure in everything they try or do. Because students prone to a learned helpless response pattern do not think strategically and they avoid risk taking behaviors, rather than overcoming learned helplessness, this perception of academic failure gets worse in older students. Learned helpless students often put themselves down and ignore or minimize praise and compliment from others, in particular from teachers, so, school staff and parents must intervene skillfully to help these children overcome a learned helpless response pattern. Some guidelines follow, but first, I introduce some important concepts.
- 18. Key Concepts It is important that teachers and parents understand that low self-confidence and learned helplessness do not necessarily relate to a lack of ability. Students with average ability and average academic skills can evidence low self-confidence and/or learned helplessness. Self-confidence and learned helplessness are both perceptions, and these perceptions can be accurate (the child lacks academic skills) or inaccurate (the child has adequate skills and average ability). However, for the student, perception is reality; learned helpless students firmly believe that their lack of ability causes their school difficulties.
- 19. Learned helpless children believe that their own behavior (i.e. trying hard and making an effort) has no positive effect on consequent events, which not only undermines the child’s motivation to learn, but also reduces his or her ability to learn, and deteriorates school performance (Seligman, 1995).Ames (1990) describes learned helpless children as students that typically exhibit low expectations, negative affect (negative beliefs and feelings), and ineffective learning strategies. For this reason, we need to deal with learned helplessness at the attributions or motivation level, the feelings level, and the academic or strategic level, which may require active involvement and coordinated effort from teachers, parents, and in more extreme cases, school counselors and/or school psychologists.
- 20. To understand better the learned helpless child, attribution style (Weiner, 1979) is a key concept. Attribution is the process of drawing inferences about the cause of a given outcome. For example, when we ask students to explain the reason for their success or failure on an academic task, the most common causes cited are ability, effort, task difficulty, or just plain luck. Ability and effort are internal attributions (inside the individual); task difficulty and luck are external attributions (outside the individual).Ability and task difficulty are stable or fixed attributions (do not change); effort and luck are unstable or variable attributions (change). In summary, we can classify attributions as internal-external and fixed-variable.Two other dimensions that we need to consider are global attribution (believing that the cause of a negative event is consistent across different contexts) versus specific attribution, or believing that the cause of the negative event is unique to a particular time or to a particular setting.
- 21. Weiner and others classified attributions along three causal dimensions: locus of control, stability, and controllability. Locus of control includes two poles: internal and external. Stability refers to whether causes change over time or not. Finally, controllability contrasts the causes that one can control (i.e. child’s skills or the child using learning strategies) from those causes that the child cannot control, like luck. Attribution style explains both low motivation and learned helplessness based on the reasons to which children attribute their successes or failure in academic tasks. According to this theory, students feel less motivated to achieve in school when they believe both (a) that ability is permanent and cannot be changed, and, (b) due to low ability, they have little or no control over their successes.
- 22. Attributions theory, in particular the concept of attribution style, remains one of the most popular theories to understand the difference in motivation and effort between high- achieving and low-achieving students.
- 23. Ames (1990) defines learned helplessness as a dysfunctional attributions pattern characterized by both passivity and loss of motivation in responding to academic tasks, in particular, those tasks that the learned helpless child perceives as challenging, or that require effort and persistence from the student. As we said earlier, learned helpless students believe that ability is fixed and all that they see is their own personal deficiencies and inadequacies. Low achieving and/or learned helpless students do not see the connection between their own effort and achieving in school, believing that school failure simply reflects their low ability (an internal and stable attribution), and that they lack the skills and/or ability they need to be able to reverse school failure.These students exhibit a helpless motivation pattern, taking little or no responsibility for their own successes (However, they take all the blame when they fail), and underestimating their performance when they do well on a task.
- 24. For example, if the child performs well on a test, is because of good luck or because the test was too easy, both external attributions that are outside the child’s control. Learned helpless students hold a self-perpetuating set of negative beliefs and attitudes that depresses their engagement and persistence in academic tasks, which makes learned helplessness primarily a motivation problem. To help children overcome this helpless response pattern, first, we need to intervene at the perceptions (beliefs and attitudes) and motivation levels.
- 25. On the next section, I present some guidelines in using attributions theory and attributions retraining to help children overcome a learned helpless response style…
- 26. Motivation Strategies Challenge the student’s belief that ability is fixed, helping the child understand that ability is incremental, that is, with focused practice and enough time, we can increase our skill or ability in doing a task. Help the child focus on the task rather than on her abilities. Define success as improvement, or developing knowledge and skills that the student did not have before. Avoid defining academic success as performing at a pre-established level (i.e. grades) or in comparison with other students (Tollefson, 2000). Help the student shift from focusing on the performance aspects of the task (normative comparisons) to concentrating on the task itself (in how to do the task; steps or procedure). Challenge the student’s belief that spending high levels of effort in a task or a skill is the same as having low ability (Tollefson, 2000). Sports analogies are excellent to help children understand that all high-level skills require a high amount of effort. Link effort with performance, telling the child that he is improving his skills because he works hard.
- 27. Make sure the child clearly sees the connection between her own effort and school success. Children who perceive this connection are more likely to respond to difficult tasks and/or failure with less frustration and with positive expectations about the outcome of the event (Ames, 1990). In schools, attributions retraining focus in teaching students that effort rather than ability determines success in school. Most specifically, attributions retraining teach children to attribute success to effort, and failure to inadequate effort. For example, we tell the child that he was trying hard when he succeeded and he needed to try harder when he failed. Students trained in attributing success and failure to the amount of effort they spent, perseverate more on academic tasks than students that believe that success and failure are due to innate ability. Most importantly, students that attribute failure to lack of effort see their future school performance as something that they can control.
- 28. Make sure that you define effort correctly, telling the student that effort is spending effective and strategic time on the learning task. Just trying harder or spending time doing random activities that are not working is not effective effort; effective and strategic effort focuses on learning strategies and procedures, that is, trying hard in a particular way is what leads to success.When the strategy or procedure that the child is using is not working, we tell her to use a different strategy or a different procedure. Teaching students to make strategic effort attributions help them see failure and academic difficulties as problem solving situations in which the search for a better strategy becomes their focus (Weiner, 1980). When we train learned helpless students in using strategic effort attributions, we can weaken the child’s perception that her lack of ability is the problem, helping her understand that the problem lies in using an ineffective strategy or an inadequate procedure. She simply needs to find a better strategy to solve that particular problem.
- 29. Teach the student to see academic errors and mistakes as her cue to change the learning strategy that she is using. Model to the student how to manage failure and setbacks in a constructive and strategic way, for example, saying, “This is not working. What is another way that I can do this?” Alternatively, “What is another strategy that I can try?” When you praise the student, tell him what he did well on the past, like, “You’ve been working hard,” avoiding focusing on the future, for example, “You need to try harder.”When we tell children that they need to work harder, they may think that they are not doing well or that the task will be difficult. Avoid praising the student for doing easy tasks, for example, praising a fifth grader because she completed ten one-digit addition facts. Instead, praise the child for her willingness to engage in academic tasks and her persistence. Your praise should be specific, not global (e.g., “Good job”), explicitly telling the child the particular skill or behavior that you are praising.
- 30. Replace personal messages or comments addressed to the child’s character (e.g., “What’s wrong with you?You never listen”) with comments and/or feedback that are behavior- specific, for example, “Try problem number seven again. Remember to carry the one.” Comments addressed to the child’s character are permanent (do not change), leading children to make fixed and negative attributions about their skills and abilities to handle academic tasks. Behavior-specific feedback describes actions or behavior that the student can improve, teaching children to address problems and academic challenges using positive and changeable attributions. Focus on feedback that tells the student how to do the task (strategies), avoiding commenting on the child’s character and/or ability to do the task, for example, “You get discouraged easily (internal, fixed, and global attribution); you can do this.”
- 31. Use feedback that is constructive and task oriented. Focus your feedback on procedure and alternative strategies, for example, “Maybe you can think of another way of doing this,” or “Let’s try something different.” Avoid vague and/or negative feedback (e.g., “Your essay is sloppily written”); making sure that your feedback gives the child specific information about how to fix errors and mistakes (e.g., “Your essay was missing…”). Use attributions retraining to build self-confidence.Teach the child to attribute failure to external, unstable, and specific causes, and to attribute success to internal, stable, and global causes.With attributions retraining, children learn to use external attributions to explain failure, attributing failure to situational or environmental conditions, rather than blaming themselves (Weiner, 1979). For example, failure is the result of having bad luck with a tricky test or because the day of the test the room was too cold and they had difficulty concentrating, in other words, failure was not their fault.When we manipulate children’s attributions, we make sure that failure does not affect their self-confidence, but success helps in building pride and self-confidence.
- 32. In summary, from the attributions perspective, to help children overcome a learned helpless response style, the key lies in convincing students that their academic performance is due primarily to factors that they can control and they can improve. Manipulating attributions alone will not improve self- confidence if the child keeps failing academically. For this reason, in combination with attributions retraining, we need to teach alternative learning strategies (compensatory strategies, plans, and procedures) to give the learned helpless student specific ways to remediate skill deficits.
- 33. Teach the student to regulate his own motivation actively and purposively using motivation regulation strategies (Wolters, 2003). First, explain to the child that all students at one time or another experience motivation setbacks and obstacles, for example, they feel bored with a particular task or they get distracted from the task. Students can control and manipulate their motivation to increase both intensity of effort and engagement with the task.
- 34. Some motivation regulation strategies that Wolters recommend… Using self-administered consequences for own behavior.This strategy involves the identification and administration of extrinsic rewards (e.g. a snack or playing a video game after completing the task) for reaching a particular goal associated with completing the task. For example, the child says, “After I finish my essay, I will take a 15 minutes break to eat my snack.” Alternatively, to influence own motivation, the student may rely in denying himself the self-selected reward, for example, “If I don’t finish my essay, I cannot play my video game for three days in a row.” In addition to using tangible rewards, the child can use self-talking or self-praising, that is, making encouraging and positive verbal statements, for example, “Good, I finish another problem. Nice job. Each day I get better at doing this.” Using goal-oriented self-talking, that is, stating the reasons she has for persisting in completing the task. For example, when tempted to quit, the child thinks of wanting to improve her grades (a performance goal), or she may think about wanting to satisfy her curiosity, feeling competent, feeling smart, or feeling more independent (mastery goals).
- 35. To enhance interest on the task, the child can modify the way he is doing the task so that the process feels less repetitive and boring. For example, the child can switch from cursive writing to script, or he can turn the task into a game. I know of one child that, to persist in completing long division problems rewards himself five tokens for accurate answers higher that ten thousands, and three tokens for answers below ten thousands. Children are imaginative and creative, so, they are not going to face much difficulty in finding alternative and/or game-like ways to handle long and tedious tasks. Environmental structuring, that is, modifying the environment to reduce distractions. Simple modifications that can re-energize an apathetic or unfocused child are changing the location, changing seats, facing the desk towards the wall to avoid getting distracted, taking a nap before studying, taking short breaks in-between tasks, eating or drinking a food that will increase the level of energy, and/or listening to music to become more attentive.
- 36. To shift the student’s locus of control from external (other people or circumstances are in control) to internal (being in control of actions that lead to academic improvement), follow the child’s interests and teach him how to set task-focused self-goals. Help the child develop a short-term goal (the child creates the goal or selects from a menu of goals) with a systematic (step-by-step) plan and learning strategies for making progress towards the goal. For example, the child can work on a goal like, “For the next fifteen minutes, I am going to remain seated and working on my addition problems.” Gradually, progress the child to goals that require more time, for example, “By May 15, I will complete accurately three addition problems with one renaming.” Once children learn to develop self-goals, and they focus on strategies rather than outcomes or performance, they are more likely to “own” the outcome (Ames, 1990). Make sure that the goal that the child selects is realistic, and that you provide frequent feedback and teach alternative learning strategies to ensure success.
- 37. References (Part 2) 1. Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation:What teachers need to know. Teachers College Record, 91, pp. 409-421. 2. Burhans, K., & Dweck, C. S. (1995). Helplessness in early childhood:The role of contingent worth. Child Development, 66, pp.1719-1738. 3. Seligman, M.E., Reivich, K., Jaycox, L., & Gillham, J. (1995). The optimistic child. NewYork: Houghton Mifflin. 4. Sutherland, K. S., & Singh, N. N. (2004). Learned helplessness and students with emotional or behavioral disorders: Deprivation in the classroom. Behavioral Disorders, 29(2), pp. 169-181. 5. Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications of cognitive theories of motivation. Educational Psychology Review,Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 63-83. 6. Weiner, B. (1979). A theory of motivation for some classroom experiences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, pp. 3-25. 7. Wolters, C. A. (2003). Regulation of motivation: Evaluating an underemphasized aspect of self-regulated learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(4), pp. 189-205.
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- 39. Watch Your Language! Ways ofTalking and Interacting with Students that Crack the Behavior Code To preview this book on Amazon, visit myAuthor Page (Books in Child Guidance)