What Factors Do Affect Students' Self-Educational Abilities? : Effects of Learning Goals, Causal Attribution, Self-Efficacy, and the Implicit Theory of Intelligence

This study investigated the relationships of students' self-educational ability with learning goal, causal attribution, self-efficacy, and the implicit theory of intelligence. A total of 768 students completed three kinds of questionaires, each of which was to measure their self-education ability in their college age, high school age, and elementary school age. They also completed four kinds of questionaires, each of which was to measure their learning goals, causal attribution for success and failure, self-efficacy, and the implicit theory of intelligence. The major findings were as follows: (1) The students who had a high mastery goal showed more self-educational ability than those who have low mastery goal; (2) Causal attribution for success and failure was correlated with self-educational ability; (3) The students whose self-efficacy was high showed more self-educational ability than those whose self-efficacy was low; and (4) the students who regarded intelligence as malleable showed high self-educational ability in their college age than those who regarded intelligence as fixed. These results were discussed in relation to how to foster the self-educational ability of students