The Influence Of High School Students’ Causal Attributions On Their Meta-cognitive Strategy Use

This study was undertaken to investigate the influence of causal attributions on senior high school students’meta-cognitive strategy use. A survey was conducted to examine the influence.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What is the overall situation of the use of meta-cognitive strategies by the senior high school students? Is there any significant gender difference?2. What kind(s) of causal attributions do the senior high school students hold? Is there any significant gender difference?3. Which causal attributions are the best predictors of meta-cognitive strategies? What are the corresponding path models of causal attributions predicting meta-cognitive strategies?The subjects in this study were782first-and second-year students from the High School Attached to Yangzhou University. The instrument of this study was a questionnaire which investigates the students’use of meta-cognitive strategies and their causal attributions. All the data in this study were collected in class for self-study and processed and analyzed by means of SPSS17.0. There are three steps in the process: first, descriptive analyses were used to describe the mean scores of all the items; second, independent samples T-test was employed to compare the means and investigate the gender differences in meta-cognitive strategy use and causal attributions; finally, the analyses of regression was used to examine the correlations between meta-cognitive strategy use and causal attributions and establish the path models which represent the influence of causal attributions on meta-cognitive strategy use.The major findings from this study are as follows:Firstly, senior high school students use meta-cognitive strategies at a relatively high level, with monitoring strategies most frequently used and planning strategies the least. Females folly outperformed males in all these three sub-strategies and very highly significant difference was found between the two groups.Secondly, high school students attribute their academic success to effort as well as ability and academic failure to effort. Male and female groups differ significantly in the external attributions such as luck and context.Finally, each of the sub-categories of meta-cognitive strategies and the sub-scale of causal attributions are significantly correlated. Six of the eight causal attributions have significant predictive power over meta-cognitive strategy use and luck-success and effort-success show stronger influence.There are some pedagogical implications. First of all, high school English teachers must retrain students’attributions and thus help them develop adaptive causal attributions. Then, high school teachers need conduct metacognitive strategy training based on gender difference. Lastly, they should pay much attention to students’ autonomy.