The relationship among anxiety, attribution of success and failure, and the social context in schools

Pajor, G (Gabriella)
Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Kazinczy u. 23-27., 1075, Budapest

 

Submission type

Oral only

Scheduled

Room 118, 10-07-2019, 09:00 - 10:30

Keywords

anxiety, attribution, social support

Summary

Several cognitive and affective factors have an impact on effective learning, and the output of learning can be measured and evaluated in several ways. The likelihood of anxiety is higher when a person has a low expectation of gaining satisfactory evaluation form important others (Zeidner és Matthews, 2005).

In November 2018 we conducted a research (n=424) in 6 Hungarian secondary schools with the goal of investigating the relationship among evaluation anxiety, social support and the attribution of success and failure. We found that neither test anxiety nor school anxiety in general has direct influence on grade averages. Also, according to our data, success attributed to effort has a direct influence on test anxiety. This result is in accordance with Weiner’s Attribution Theory (1986), because though attributing success to effort gives the control of learning into the students’ hands, the unstable character of effort makes the future achievement uncertain, which can be stressful. We also found that teacher support correlates with attributing success to effort, therefore it is of high importance to make teachers aware that emphasizing effort is not enough to help students achieve, but it is important to show the kind of effort that best suits each student.

Auteurs