The teachers' causal attributions for success and failure in teaching

Abstract

The importance of causal attribution in performance contexts are consolidated in the literature. The evidence converges as their influence on educational performance. This study aimed to investigate how teachers assign reasons for their success or failure in teaching. There were153 teachers who participated, they are of both genders in two counties of Sao Paulo. Data were collected by a Likert scale and analyzed by the procedures of descriptive and inferential statistics. The success in teaching was given more often to internal, stable and controllable causes, while failure to external, unstable and uncontrollable causes. The older teachers tended to assign uncontrollable causes for success and with longer acting internal and unstable causes for success. The results obtained in this study indicate the need for further investigation in larger and more representative samples to identify the nature of the intrapersonal functions of teachers compared to the results obtained in the educational process.