NINTH GRADERS AS
STUDENT
AIDES
339
continue to be consistently positive] academicians may come to realize that they
may have reversed the true logic in assuming that academic achievement leads to
individual fulfillment. The reverse is probably the case, at least for some students,
and the shortest and quickest route to the realization of individual satisfaction and
fulfillment in a school situation may be through the psychology of helping. All social
scientists should be interested in such a possibility.
Psychology Service
130th Station Hospital
Heidelberg, Germany
APO
NY
09102
REFERENCES
COWEN,
E.
L.,
LEIBOWITZ, E.,
&
LEIBOWITZ,
G.
Utilization of retired people as mental health aides
with children.
American Journal
of
Orthopsychiatry,
1968,
38,
900-909.
GARTNER,
A.
Do
paraprofessionals improve human services: a first critical appraisal
of
the data.
New
York: New Careers Development Center, 1969.
GARTNER,
A.,
KOHLER,
M.
C.,
&
RIESSMAN,
F.
Children teach children: learning
by
teaching.
New
York: Harper and Row, 1971.
HOLZBERG,
J.
D., GEWIRTZ, H.,
&
EBNER,
E.
Changes in moral judgment and self-acceptance in
college students as
a
function
of
companionship with hospitalized mental patients.
Journal
of
Consulting Psychology,
1964,
28,
299-303.
MORGAN,
R.
F.,
&
TOY,
T.
B.
Learning by teaching:
a student-to-student compensatory tutoring
program in a rural school system and its relevance to the educational cooperative.
Psychological
Record,
1970,
20,
159-169.
RIESSMAN,
F.
The “helper therapy” principle.
Social
Work,
1965,
10,
14-25.
ADULTS’ ATTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCCESS AND
FAILURE OF CHILDREN FROM DIFFERENT SOCIAL BACKGROUNDS
RONALD
M.
FRIEND
AND
LORRAINE
E.
WOOD
State University
of
New
York
at Stony
Brook
In
a
recent study Friend and Neale (1972) asked fifth-grade children, divided
into four groups on the basis of social class (middle and lower) and race (black and
white), how they interpreted
or
explained their performance on an academic task.
After a brief reading test and prearranged feedback (success and failure) attributions
to sucress and failure were determined. In such academic situations it is possible to
attribute success or failure to any combination of the following factors: ability,
effort, task difficulty and luck (Weiner
&
Kukla, 1969).
Weiner and Kukla argue
that ability and effort can be considered internal factors or internal causes of per-
formance; task difficulty and luck2 may be considered external factors.
It
also is
possible to classify these factors on a stability dimension, in which ability and task
difficulty can be considered relatively more invariant or stable than effort and luck.
‘The research was supported by Grant OEG-2-710131 from the Office of Education to the first
author and a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship to the second author.
2Weiner and Kukla (1970) do not explicitly define luck. In the present study luck was defined
as
“lucky guessing.”