LD and normal adolescents' causal attributions of success and failure at different levels of task difficulty. Learning Disability Quarterly

Abstract. The purpose of this study was to investigate learning disabled and nor-mal adolescents ' causal attributions of success and failure performances on various levels of task difficulty (easy, moderate, difficult). The results indicated that the students ' perceptions of the task difficulty levels was a significant determi-nant of the two groups ' differing causal attributions; locus of control was inade-quate for explaining the differences in attribution ascribed by the two groups. In many respects, the learning disabled students ' causal ascriptions for performance outcomes were similar to those of students classified as failure oriented. Weiner's (1972, 1974) model of achievement motivation has been widely employed to in-vestigate how the causal ascriptions of effort, ability, luck, and task difficulty influence achievement-related behavior. In this model, the four causal factors are classified on two dimen-sions: locus of control (internality/externality