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Effects of reward-schedule parameters

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attributions and reading persistence
ARTICLE in BULLETIN OF THE PSYCHONOMIC SOCIETY JULY 2013
DOI: 10.3758/BF03330505

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Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society

1986, 24(1), 65-68

Effects of reward-schedule parameters and

attribution retraining on children's
attributions and reading persistence
NANCY E. MEYER and DENNIS G. DYCK

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Fourth- and fifth-grade children, identified as having reading difficulties, were given persistence training on a reading task. The effects of various combinations of reward-schedule parameters
and attribution retraining (effort feedback) were evaluated. Four groups of children were given
either partial reward with nonsuccessive failure (PRF) or continuous reinforcement prior to partial reward (CRF-PRF), either with or without attribution retraining during an 8-day training
phase. An additional group received CRF without attribution retraining (effort feedback). The
results indicated an increase in reading persistence (an increase from pretest to posttest in the
number of difficult sentences attempted) as a function of attribution retraining but not of reinforcement scheduling. Although attributions to lack of ability were related to low pretest reading levels and persistence, the changes in reading persistence were not accompanied by changes
on any attribution measure. Taken together, these results support previous studies in documenting the efficacy of effort feedback in promoting persistence, but they do not support the hypothesized mediation of such persistence by altered attributions for failure.
fects between the pattern of success and failure outcomes
(a reward-scheduling parameter) and attribution retraining on reading persistence; this was done since the two
variables had been confounded in Dweck's study, and the
resultant effects, therefore, could not be unambiguously
ascribed to the attribution-retraining procedure. Chapin
and Dyck's results did, in fact, demonstrate an interactive effect between a reward-scheduling parameter, termed
N length, and attribution retraining. The specific form of
the interaction was that attribution retraining increased
persistence only under conditions of nonsuccessive failure.
Unfortunately, Chapin and Dyck did not include measures of attributional change in their study; therefore, it
was not known which, if any, of the observed changes
in persistence were mediated by altered causal attributions.
Although subsequent studies have supported the claim
that effort-feedback training enhances persistence (Andrews & Debus, 1978; Fowler & Peterson, 1981; Medway & Venino, 1982), the mechanism underlying this effect is by no means clear. Either attributional change has
not been directly assessed (Chapin & Dyck, 1976) or it
has been inconsistently related to changes in persistence,
depending on the measure used (Andrews & Debus, 1978;
Dweck, 1975; Medway & Venino, 1982).
The purpose of the present study, then, was to further
examine the changes in attributions, reading persistence,
and their relationship following various effort-feedback
and scheduling-parameter manipulations. To that end,
separate groups of children, who previously had been
identified as having significant reading problems, were
given persistence training following the methods of Chapin
and Dyck (1976). Within the context of a reading task,
four groups of children were provided with success- or

Previous investigators have been interested in studying the effects of effort-feedback (Dweck, 1975) and
reward-scheduling parameters (Chapin & Dyck, 1976) on
the reversal of the persistence deficits of academically
"helpless" children. In the effort-feedback procedure, as
initially developed by Dweck (1975), nonpersistent children were exposed to intermittent failure on an arithmetic
task, and an adult evaluator verbalized that lack of effort
caused the child's failure. This procedure, relative to a
success-only procedure, increased the persistence of children previously "helpless" in response to math failure.
Based on the premise that persistence is mediated by the
perception of personal control (Rotter, 1966; Weiner,
1972), Dweck proposed that her training procedure increased persistence by modifying causal attributions for
failure. This notion received partial support from the finding that effort-feedback training produced an increased
frequency in attributions to effort on a task-specific, but
not on a general, measure of attributions.
Chapin and Dyck (1976) followed up Dweck's initial
report with an assessment of the possible interactive efThis research was supported by a Manitoba Health Research studentship to N. E. Meyer and by a National Research Council Grant No. 3111665-06 to D. G. Dyck. The research was done in partial fulfillment
of the first author's premaster's year in the Department of Psychology.
University of Manitoba. We would like to thank Ron Petrinack for his
help in all phases of the study: Rhea Brooks. Tom Dahl. and April Machej
for their assistance in carrying it out: Linda Wilson for her helpful comments and direction: and the teachers. resource teachers. and principals
of Assiniboine South No. 3 School Division for their cooperation and
support. Requests for reprints should be sent to D. G. Dyck. Department of Psychology. University of Manitoba. Winnipeg. Manitoba.
Canada R3T 2N2.

65

Copyright 1986 Psychonomic Society, Inc.

66

MEYER AND DYCK

failure-feedback patterns, in the form of either partial reinforcement (PRF) or continuous reinforcement (CRF) prior
to PRF training (CRF-PRF), which were combined either
with or without effort feedback (attribution retraining) .
A fifth group received success-only reinforcement (CRF).
Both PRF schedules developed for this study contained
nonsuccessive failure (N length = 1), because it is under
these conditions that the effects of the effort-feedback
procedures are most likely to be observed (Chapin &
Dyck, 1976). The two-stage schedule (CRF-PRF) was
selected for comparison purposes in order to capitalize
on the known benefits of the individual CRF and PRF
schedules. Specifically, the initial experience with CRF
was hypothesized to provide children who had previously
experienced much reading failure with increased expectations of success and mastery. The later exposure to PRF ,
which involved the gradual "fading in" of failure (Terrace, 1966, 1969), was designed to promote reading persistence (Cotler & Nygaard, 1969; Yelen, 1980). The
number of difficult sentences that children attempted to
read was recorded both prior to and following the persistence training phase; this constituted the measure of reading persistence. Pre- and posttesting was performd by an
experimenter who was blind to the children's training condition. Two self-report attribution scales were used to assess the reasons children gave for reading failure and for
academic outcomes in general.

METHOD
Subjects
There were 30 subjects, 5 females and 25 males between the ages
of 8 and 11 years, who participated in the treatment conditions. 1 They
were selected from 71 Grade 4 and 5 students with reading problems
from two schools in a Winnipeg school division.
Materials
The Informal Reading Assessment (IRA; Bums & Roe, 1980) was
administered to all students with reading problems. The IRA was used
to identify each student's reading level for the reading task. The inventory contains graded word lists, which each subject read orally. The
number of errors in a list determined a subject's grade reading level.
The word lists of the IRA were used to construct the sentence inventory used in training and in pre- and posttest. After a subject's reading
level was assessed by the IRA, success and failure sentences were assigned from a corresponding level in the sentence inventory. Success
and failure sentences for each reading level were drawn from previous
and subsequent reading levels, respectively.
A JO-item subset of the 34-item Intellectual Achievement Responsibility (IAR) Scale (Crandall, Katkavsky , & Crandall, 1965) was administered in the selection process and again after the posttest in order
to assess attributions in academic situations. Each item depicts an achievement situation and an internal and external attribution in which the child
must take personal responsibility for outcomes or relegate that responsibility to others. We adopted this subset of items from Diener and Dweck
(1978) because we were also concerned with children's attributions to
effort in failure situations.
An Effort versus Ability Attribution Scale (EAS) for reading, similar to Dweck's (1975) task-specific attribution measure for arithmetic,
was administered in pre- and posttest. The scale is designed to assess
the extent to which children attribute their reading performance to ability or effort. It depicts 10 negative reading situations (e.g., "You were
asked to read a story aloud in class. You had trouble and stopped because: (a) you hadn't practiced reading it the night before, or (b) you
weren't a good oral reader").

Procedure
Seventy-one students experiencing reading problems were identified
by teachers and reading scores from Canadian Achievement Tests. The
behavioral measure of persistence, consisting of pretest failure sentences,
was administered to all 71 children. The 30 children with the lowest
persistence scores were selected and assigned to the treatment conditions. The reading inventory (IRA), which had been used to construct
the reading task, was then used to identify subjects' reading levels.
Pretest/posttest. Subjects were individually tested on pre- and posttraining persistence and attributions by different persons than those who
conducted the training. The pre- and posttest consisted of 20 failure sentences, which the subjects were asked to read aloud. After each sentence, subjects were given feedback about their accuracy and asked
whether they would like to continue reading (e.g ., "That's incorrect,
would you like to go on to the next sentence or to stop?"). Persistence
was defined as the number of sentences attempted. Following the persistence measure, the EAS was administered in pre- and posttest, and
the IAR was administered in posttest.
Treatment conditions. With the restriction that an equal proportion
of females (at least 1) be assigned to each condition, the 30 subjects
were also matched on their persistence scores and assigned to one of
the five treatment conditions. 2 In three conditions, the reinforcement
schedules (CRF, PRF, CRF-PRF) were given without attribution retraining (AR), and in two conditions, the schedules were combined with AR,
(PRF-AR, CRF-PRF-AR).
During training treatments , the subjects were asked to read sentences
that were preassigned at various levels of difficulty to ensure appropriate levels of success or failure. The SUbjects read 10 sentences each day
for 8 days . To increase the salience of the feedback , the subjects were
asked to keep a tally of their performance (right or wrong) as they read.
In the attribution retraining groups, the experimenter provided effort
feedback to the subject for success and failure trials: "That's correct,
that means you tried hard," or "That's incorrect, that means you didn't
try hard enough. " The groups without attribution retraining were told
only about the accuracy of their responses .
The CRF group received only success sentences . In designing the
schedules for the PRF and CRF-PRF groups, an attempt was made to
have: (a) a similar percentage of reinforcement in each group, (b) no
consecutive failure trials, and (c) a similar number of failure trials on
the last day . The schedules of success and failure trials that were used
in training are shown in Table I.
Following the training and the posttest, all subjects were given an
additional set of success sentences to read for debriefing purposes.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Persistence
Table 2 presents the means and standard deviations of
the reading persistence scores on pretest and posttest for
each group. A 5 (group) X 2 (trials) mixed-design
repeated measures ANOV A revealed only a significant
main effect for trials [F(1,24) = 5.89, p < .05].
Although this result implies that all groups were more persistent on the posttest, relative to the pretest, a more
detailed inspection of the data indicated that this was not
the case. Specifically, correlated t tests indicated that only
the two groups that received effort feedback benefited
from persistence training [Group CRF-PRF-AR, t(5) =
2.36, p < .05; and Group PRF-AR, t(5) = 2.34,
p < .05]. Thus attribution retraining increased reading
persistence, but the reward schedules did not. The results
are consistent with Chapin and Dyck (1976), showing that
PRF schedules with nonsuccessive failure (N length =
1) do not increase reading persistence without the benefit
of attribution retraining. The critical scheduling manipulation appears to be N length, the number of successive

READING PERSISTENCE
Table 1
Schedules of Success (S) and Failure (F) Trials for Training
Sentence
4
Day
2
3
5
7
10
6
8
9
CRF-PRF
I
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
2
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
3
S
S
F
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
4
S
S
S
F
F
S
S
S
S
S
F
F
F
5
S
S
S
S
S
S
S
F
F
6
S
S
S
F
S
S
F
S
7
S
F
S
F
S
F
F
S
S
S
F
F
8
S
S
S
S
F
S
F
S
I
2
3

4
5
6
7
8

S
S
S
S
F
S
S
S

S
S
S
S
S
F
S
F

F
S
F
F
S
S
F
S

PRF
S
S
F
S
F
S
S
S
F
S
S
S
S
S
F
S

F
S
S
S
S
S
F
F

S
F
S
S
S
F
S
S

S
S
F
S
S
S
S
F

F
S
S
F
S
S
S
S

S
S
S
S
F
S
F
S

Table 2
Means and Standard Deviations of the Number of Sentences
Attempted for Each Training Condition
Posttest
Pretest
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
Condition
NoAR
3.4
4 .6
1.1
\.8
CRF
7.5
7.0
3.8
2.3
PRF
4.7
2 .9
3.2
\.5
CRF-PRF
AR
PRF
CRF-PRF

3.7
3.8

2.4
3.0

7.8
8.8

6.5
6.6

Note-NoAR = without attribution retraining; AR = with attribution

retraining; CRF = continuous reinforcement; PRF = panial reinforcement; CRF-PRF = two-stage continuous and partial reinforcement.
Although the sentence inventory has not yet been formally validated.
its sentences prm'ed to be effective in providing the appropriate success
and failure trials.

failures prior to success (see Capaldi, 1967; Chapin &

Dyck, 1976), rather than the provision of CRF prior to
PRF.
That the children who received CRF prior to PRF
benefited from attribution retraining is noteworthy. This
finding suggests that failure can be faded in without any
loss in persistence, at least relative to a PRF schedule with
nonsuccessive failure. Although not shown here, there
may be advantages to the initial use of CRF in remedial
programs, due to the fact that children with a history of
failure may have difficulty processing success (Diener &
Dweck, 1980). For such children, the initial provision of
success (CRF) may be important to the modification of
attributions for success, whereas the PRF procedure may
be more conducive to the modification of attributions for
failure.

Attributions
Correlation analyses indicated that reading-specific attributions (EAS scores) were modestly related to pretest

67

reading persistence scores [r(29) = - .19, P < .10] and

also related to reading achievement level as assessed by
the IRA [r(20) = - .25, P < .05] . These results indicate that lower reading performance and persistence levels
were associated with the tendency to make attributions
for failure in reading to lack of ability as opposed to lack
of effort. On the other hand, the more general attributional profile, as revealed by the IAR, was not associated
with reading level or persistence.
Since a major purpose of this study was to examine the
relationship between attributions and persistence under
various parameters of persistence training, a number of
correlational and analysis of variance procedures were applied to the pretest and posttest scores of the EAS and
IAR. No significant correlations or effects were found,
suggesting that the observed behavioral changes were not
mediated by modified attributions. We are left, then, with
an attribution-retraining manipulation that enhances persistence in the manner predicted by theory but, at the same
time, has no measurable effect on attributions. In our
view, the lack of attributional change could be explained
by the comparatively short duration of persistence training, or an EAS measure that assessed attributions to a variety of reading situations, rather than to the sentence task
itself. Also, in both the EAS and the IAR, only attributions for failure were assessed. A more composite measure of attributions for success and failure may have
yielded a more discriminating attributional profile from
which changes could be assessed.
Finally, even with an extended training period and improved measures, the relationship between persistence and
attributions may be modest. Effort feedback and scheduling procedures may boost persistence through the modification of other mediating processes such as increased "efficacy ~xpectation " (see Bandura, Adams, & Beyer, 1977)
and higher levels of accustomed learned effort expenditure (see Eisenberger, Leonard, Carlson, & Park, 1979).
In addition to defining the relationshp between causal attributions and performance, further work is needed to
identify the contributions of other potential mediators of
persistence and achievement behaviors .
REFERENCES
ANDREWS, G. R. , & DEBUS, R. L. (1978). Persistence and the causal
perception of failure: Modifying cognitive attributions. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 70, 154-166.

BURNS, P. c., & ROE, B. D. (1980). Informal reading assessment. New

York: Houghton Mifflin.
BANDURA, A., ADAMS, N. E., & BEYER, J. (1977) . Cognitive processes
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CAPALDI. E. 1. (1967). A sequential hypothesis of instrumental learning. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. I) . New York: Academic Press.
CHAPIN, M. , & DYCK, D. G. (1976). Persistence in children's reading
behavior as a function of N length and attribution retraining. Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 511-515.

COTlER. S. B., & NYGAARD, 1. E. (1969). Resistance to extinction following sequences of partial and continuous reinforcement in a human choice task. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 270-274.
CRANDALL, V. C., KATKOVSKY, W., & CRANDALL, V.I . (1965) . Chil-

68

MEYER AND DYCK

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NOTES

I. One male subject's results were not used in the data analysis because he did not experience failure in pre- and posttest. He read 3/4 and
11/, 5 of his attempted failure sentences correctly on pre- and posttest,
respectively.
2. Fewer girls than boys were initially selected as experiencing reading problems. On the basis of pretest persistence, only 4 girls initially
fell within the range of the 30 least persistent children.

(Manuscript received for publication October I, 1985.)