A Study Of The Attributional Beliefs Of The Senior Students In Kunming Girls' Middle School

In recent years, a lot of teachers have gradually realized that motivation is the most powerful influence on learning. Weiner, an American social psychologist, has discovered that people's future goal expectancy is affected by their ascriptions of the past experiences of successes and failures. Therefore, attributional beliefs can reflect students' motivation to learn, and attribution theory has become the most influential and systematic theory to explain the motivation to learn (Zhang, 1996) since its application to education in the 1980s.The present research is conducted in Kunming Girls' Middle School and the subjects are all senior students composed of two groups: the students from the Spring Bud Classes, most of whom are from minority ethnic groups in remote mountainous areas in Yunnan province and the other students from ordinary classes from the city of Kunming. The purposes of this research are: 1) to find out what attributional beliefs the students hold; and 2) to discover whether there is connection between the students' attributional beliefs and their learning results and the motivation to learn English.Based on the Multidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale (MMCS) (Lefcourt, 1981), the questionnaire is tailored and reworded to better serve the purposes of this research and to be better understood by the subjects. The personal information and their responses to the questionnaire are collected in this study. With the help of SPSS (10.0). the results of the research are analyzed and the findings are summarized as follows:1) Generally speaking, the students hold positive attributional beliefs. Most of them see their learning outcomes and effort covary, and they ascribe success to high ability. On the other hand, there is a tendency that context is perceived as a main cause for their learning outcomes.2) The differences in attributional beliefs held by the students of the Spring Bud Classes and the Ordinary Classes are salient, especially in the attribution to the factor of teachers.3) As far as the differences discovered among the three grades are concerned, striking contrasts are found in the attributions to effort, ability, teacher and luck.4) After a comparative study of the students' learning results and their attributional...