Improving the academic performance of college freshmen: Attribution therapy revisited.

Abstract

An attributional intervention was devised to help college freshmen who were concerned about their academic performance. Unlike most previous attribution therapy attempts, an effort was made to change subjects' attributions for their problems from stable to unstable causes, rather than from internal to external causes. Freshmen were given information indicating that on the average, college students improve their grades from the freshman to the upperclass years, plus they were shown videotaped interviews of upperclassmen who reported that their grade point averages (GPA) had improved since their freshman year. The effect of this GPA information was dramatic. Subjaf ts who received the information as compared to subjects who did not: (a) were significantly less apt to leave college by the end of the sophomore year, (b) had a significantly greater increase in GPA 1 year after the study, and (c) performed significantly better on sample items from the Graduate Record Exam. As in many self-attribution studies, the self-report evidence for the cognitive processes mediating these behavioral changes was weak. None of the self-report measures of attitudes, expectancies, or mood correlated with the behavioral results. In addition, the GPA information had no effect on self-reports of mood. A more positive mood was reported only by subjects who performed a reasons analysis (i.e., who were asked to list reasons why their grades might improve). This divergent pattern of behavioral and selfreport results is discussed in terms of the hypothesis that the determinants of behavioral results differ from the determinants of self-report results in self-attribution studies.