Understanding Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is the belief that our own behavior does
not influence what happens next; that is, behavior does not control outcomes or
results. For example, when a student believes that she is in charge of the
outcome, she may think, “If I study hard for this test, I’ll get a good grade.”
On the contrary, a learned helpless student thinks, “No matter how hard I study
for this test, I’ll always get a bad grade.” In school, learned helplessness
relates to poor grades and underachievement, and to behavior difficulties.
Students who experience repeated school failure are particularly prone to develop a learned helpless
response style. Because of repeated academic failure, these students begin to
doubt their own abilities, leading them to doubt that they can do anything to
overcome their school difficulties. Consequently, they decrease their
achievement efforts, particularly when faced with difficult materials, which
leads to more school failure. This pattern of giving up when facing difficult
tasks reinforces the child’s belief that he or she cannot overcome his or her
academic difficulties.
Learned
helplessness seems to contribute to the school failure experienced by many
students with a learning disability.
In a never-ending cycle, children with a learning disability frequently
experience school difficulties over an extended period, and across a variety of
tasks, school settings, and teachers, which in turn reinforces the child’s
feeling of being helpless.
Characteristics of Learned Helpless Students
Some characteristics of learned helpless children
are:
2. Low
outcome expectations; that is, they believe that, no matter what they do in
school, the outcome will always be negative (e.g. bad grades). In addition,
they believe that they are powerless to prevent or overcome a negative outcome.
3. Lack
of perceived control over their own behavior and the environmental events;
one’s own actions cannot lead to success.
4. Lack
of confidence in their skills and abilities (low self-efficacy expectations). These children believe that their school
difficulties are caused by their own lack of ability and low intelligence, even
when they have adequate ability and
normal intelligence. They are convinced that they are unable to perform the
required actions to achieve a positive outcome.
5. They
underestimate their performance when
they do well in school, attributing success to luck or chance, e.g., “I was
lucky that this test was easy.”
6. They
generalize from one failure situation or experience to other situations where
control is possible. Because they expect failure all the time, regardless of
their real skills and abilities, they underperform all the time.
7. They
focus on what they cannot do, rather than focusing on their strengths and
skills.
8. Because they feel incapable
of implementing the necessary courses of action, they develop passivity and
their school performance deteriorates.
The Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Learned helpless students, perceive school failure as something
that they will never overcome, and academic events, positive or negative, as
something out of their control. This expectation of failure and perceived lack
of control is central in the development of a learned helpless style. The way
in which children perceive and interpret their experiences in the classroom
helps us understand why some children develop an optimistic
explanatory style, and believe that they are capable of achieving
in school and others develop a pessimistic explanatory style,
believing that they are not capable of succeeding in school (Seligman, Reivich,
Jaycox, and Gilham, 1995).
Children with an optimistic explanatory style attribute school
failure to momentary and specific
circumstances; for example, “I just happened to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time.” Children with a pessimistic explanatory style explain negative
events as something stable (the cause of the negative event will
always be present), global(the cause of the
negative event affects all areas of their lives), and internal (they conclude that they are
responsible for the outcome or consequence of the negative event). A typical
pessimistic explanatory style is, “I always fail no matter what I do.” On the
contrary, when the outcome of the event is positive, a pessimistic child
attributes the outcome to unstable (the cause of the event is
transitory), specific(the cause of
the event is situation specific), and external (other people or circumstances are
responsible for the outcome) causes.
Learned Helpless Students Need Learning Strategies
Learned Helpless Students Need to Believe that Effort Increases
Skills
To accomplish this, we need to help learned helpless children
recognize and take credit for the skills and abilities that they already have.
In addition, we need to develop in children the belief that ability is
incremental, not fixed; that is, effort increases ability and skills. Tollefson
(2000) recommends that we help children see success as improvement;
that is, we are successful when we acquire or refine knowledge and skills we
did not have before. We need to avoid communicating children that, to succeed
in school, they need to perform at a particular level, or they need to perform
at the same level than other students. When we help children see success as
improvement, states Tollefson, we are encouraging them to expend effort to
remediate their academic difficulties. In addition, we are training them to
focus on strategies and the process of learning, rather than outcomes and
achievement.
Concluding Comments
To minimize the negative impact of learned helplessness in
children, we need to train them to focus on strategies and processes to reach
their academic goals, reinforcing the belief that, through effort, they are in
control of their own behavior, and that they are in charge of developing their
own academic skills. For example, to help a child focus on the learning
process, after failure, we can tell the child, “Maybe you can think of another
way of doing this.” This way, our feedback stays focused on the child’s effort
and the learning strategies he or she is using -within both the child’s control
and modifiable. When children themselves learn to focus on effort and
strategies, they can start feeling responsible for positive outcomes, and
responsible for their own successes in school and in life.
References
Ames, C. A. (1990). Motivation: What teachers need to know. Teachers
College Record. Vol.
91, No. 3, pp. 409-421.
Eccles, S., Wigfield, A., and Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation
to succeed. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology.
Vol. 3 (5th ed., pp.
1017-1095). New York: Wiley.
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