Learned helpless students, perceive school failure
as something that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or
negative, as something out of their control. This expectation of failure and
perceived lack of control is central in the development of a learned helpless
style. The way in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in
the classroom helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic
explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving in school
and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style, believing that
they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich, Jaycox, and
Gilham, 1995).
Children with an optimistic explanatory style
attribute school failure to momentary and specific circumstances; for example,
“I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Children with a
pessimistic explanatory style explain negative events as something stable (the
cause of the negative event will always be present), global (the
cause of the negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they
conclude that they are responsible for the outcome or consequence of the
negative event). A typical pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no
matter what I do.” On the contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive,
a pessimistic child attributes the outcome to unstable (the
cause of the event is transitory), specific (the cause of the
event is situation specific), and external (other people or
circumstances are responsible for the outcome) causes.
Learned Helpless Students Need
Learning Strategies
Due to this perceived lack of control of the
negative event, a learned helpless child is reluctant to seek assistance or
help when he is having difficulty performing an academic task. These children
are ineffective in using learning strategies, and they do not know how to
engage in strategic task behavior to solve academic problems. For example,
learned helpless children are unaware that if they create a plan, use a
checklist, and/or make drawings, it will be easier for them to solve a
multistep math word problem. With learned helpless children, success alone
(e.g. solving accurately the multistep problem), is not going to ease the
helpless perception or boost their self-confidence; remember that these
children attribute their specific successes to luck or chance. According to
Eccles, Wigfield, and Schiefele (1998), trying to persuade a learned helpless
child that she can succeed, and asking her just to try hard, will be ineffective
if we do not teach the child specific learning and compensatory strategies that
she can apply to improve her performance when facing a difficult task. The
authors state that the key in helping a learned helpless child overcome this
dysfunctional explanatory pattern is to provide strategy retraining (teaching
her strategies to use, and teaching explicitly when she can use those
strategies), so that we give the child specific ways to remedy achievement
problems; coupled with attribution retraining, or creating and
maintaining a success expectation. When we teach a learned helpless child to
use learning strategies, we are giving her the tools she needs to develop and
maintain the perception that she has the resources to reverse failure. Ames
(1990) recommends that, in combination with the learning strategies, we help
the learned helpless child develop individualized short-term goals, e.g., “I
will make drawings to accurately solve a two-steps math word problem.” When the
child knows and implements learning strategies, she will be able to experience
progress toward her individualized goals.
Learned Helpless Students Need to
Believe that Effort Increases Skills
To accomplish this, we need to help learned
helpless children recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that
they already have. In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that
ability is incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and
skills. Tollefson (2000) recommends that we help children see success as improvement;
that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we
did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed
in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform
at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as
improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to
remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to
focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and
achievement.
Concluding Comments
To minimize the negative impact of learned
helplessness in children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and
processes to reach their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort,
they are in control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of
developing their own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the
learning process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of
another way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s
effort and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s
control and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and
strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and
responsible for their own successes in school and in life.
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