Causal Attributions of Success and Failure: A Comparison of Madrassah and Secondary School Students

Abstract

The study was conducted to do comparisons of causal attributions of success and failure in the population of two different streams of education in Pakistan. The researchers gathered data on eight causal attributions namely ability, effort, use of strategy, task interest, luck, difficulty of task, influence of teacher and influence of parents. The sample comprised of 1826 students from both streams of education (619 madrassah and 1207 secondary school students). There were 1023 students from district Lahore and 803 students from district Faisalabad. Two madrassah each and eight secondary schools each were randomly selected for data collection. The results showed that learners had same identical patterns of success attributions where as they had different patterns of failure attributions. According to mean scores secondary school students had a higher mean score on success attributions of effort, use of strategy and influence of parents than the madrassah students.