The Effect of Attributional Retraining Program on Learned Helplessness and Achievement Motivation in Students with Low Academic Achievement in Middle School

Introduction:  When learned helplessness formed in the person, the path to any motivation and effort ends, and in that person's mind any movement results in failures. The present research was aimed at the effectiveness of the attributional retraining program on the learned helplessness and achievement motivation of students with low academic achievement. Methods: In this quasi-experimental study, a post-test design with a control group was used. Thirty-two boy middle school students with low academic achievement from Karaj were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method and randomly assigned in two treatment and control groups for each sixteen people. The treatment group participated in nine sessions of sixty minutes for five weeks and two times a week in the attributional retraining program. After the intervention, the two groups completed the learned helplessness and achievement motivation questionnaires and their data were compared through multivariate analysis of variance(MANOVA). Results: The results of multivariate analysis of covariance showed that compared to the control group, the treatment group showed a significant decrease in learned helplessness and a significant improvement in achievement motivation. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that training an attributional retraining program can reduce the learned helplessness of students with low academic achievement and improve their achievement motivation.