A Theory of Motivation for Some Classroom Experiences – A Commentary

Bernard Weiner, author of the article A Theory of Motivation for Some Classroom Experiences, goes into great detail describing the main aspects of Attribution Theory. This article was very descriptive and provided a lot of valuable information about Attribution Theory. While reading, I began to think about the causes of success and failure which Weiner mentions. I find it very interesting that many of these attributes appear in every day life. There are times when a person succeeds or fails due to certain attributes and that many times, the outcome of an event will influence a person’s effort in the future. For instance, I was tutoring a fourth grade girl in reading and writing and because she was unsuccessful in the past, she did not engage herself in class and believed that she would not succeed with reading. Because of this, she has developed learned helplessness. This girl has come to believe that whatever effort she puts into reading is independent of becoming a strong reader so she has resorted to apathy when it comes to her classes.

I find this article to be very interesting because it takes into account many different situations which can be dependent on the locus of causality. According to Weiner, locus of causality is defined on three different dimensions. The first dimension of cause is internal or external compared to the subject. Some of the internal causes are effort, mood, health, and maturity, while some external factors would be task and other people. The next dimension is stability which refers to variant or invariant causes. For example, ability, typical effort, and family would be considered invariant or stable causes while immediate effort, attention, and mood are variant causes. Finally, the third dimension is controllability or intentionality. Something that a person can have control over, such as effort, will have a different outcome than something a person cannot control, like teacher bias. After reading the article, I have come to realize how common the locus of causality is found in many people’s actions. Although this article was very interesting and caused me to think about specific examples of attribution, I feel like it was too detailed and complicated. A lot of the reading could be removed or worded differently so that less time would be spent on decoding and more time can be spent on considering what Weiner reports. Overall, I thought this was a very interesting and beneficial article which provides a lot of valuable information about Attribution Theory.