The Role of Success in Mastery and Helpless Achievement Orientations [microform] / Marianne Miserandino.
The major task of life is to become masterful. As individuals grow the choice of which tasks to attempt and how best to achieve mastery at them becomes increasingly under their control by the situations they choose to engage in and by perceptions of their abilities. Mastery oriented people tend to a...
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| Format: | Microfilm Book |
| Language: | English |
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[S.l.] :
Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse,
1988.
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| Summary: | The major task of life is to become masterful. As individuals grow the choice of which tasks to attempt and how best to achieve mastery at them becomes increasingly under their control by the situations they choose to engage in and by perceptions of their abilities. Mastery oriented people tend to attribute failure to unstable, external factors (luck) or to controllable, internal factors (effort). In contrast, the helpless oriented people tend to attribute failure to stable, external factors (task difficulty), and to uncontrollable, internal factors (lack of ability). Previous research on mastery and helplessness has found that subjects classified as mastery oriented or helpless oriented differ in their views of success and failure. Classification has typically been made based on subjects' reactions to failure only. In this study 60 female and 30 male high school seniors received orientation scores on the basis of their typical attributions for successes and failures. These scores were used to predict achievement as measured by subjects' grades and their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. It was found that success and failure together predicted achievement better than either alone. This finding has implications, not only for the theory of mastery and helplessness and the role of these orientations in achievement, but for understanding reactions to depression and other illnesses as well. (Author/ABL) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (96th, Atlanta, GA, August 12-16, 1988). ERIC Document Number: ED303752. |
| Physical Description: | 9 p. |
| Reproduction Note: | Microfiche. |
| Action Note: | committed to retain 20240101 2049101 Alliance Shared Trust https://www.coalliance.org/shared-print-archiving-policies |