Brandon Vaughn University of Texas at Austin brandon

Brandon Vaughn University of Texas at Austin brandon. vaughn@mail. utexas. edu

What is Learned Helplessness? • A condition in which one feels they can not exert any control over their environment • This psychological condition leads to impaired learning ability in many people, children and adults alike

Why this interest? • A lot of great research has been done on anxiety and stress in regard to learning statistics. • I was seeing something different … a paradigm of failure.

How Does it Develop? • If a person is put into a situation where their behavior does not affect their situation or environment, they become passive and their desires to act or try harder dissolves • Repeated or prolonged failure and discouragement

What it does • Sets students behind academically • Dampens social skills and willingness to socialize • Erodes self-confidence • Diminishes problem solving skills • Causes wandering attentions/diminishes attention span

How do you spot it? • Children suffering from learned helplessness may become class clowns or bullies, possibly to get recognition for something • Students, particularly in high school or college, may become anti-social (which might explain why some teamwork is worse than others) • Students suffering from learned helplessness will simply give up at the slightest hint of a challenge or at any failure

Who is to “blame”? !

Helplessness = Paradigm of Failure • Stable vs. Unstable: ‘I’m stupid’ is stable, also called permanence. • Internal vs. External: They blame themselves as opposed to any other influence. • Global vs. Specific: If they think they are stupid, it will affect all aspects of their life. Also called pervasive vs. isolated.

Construct Definition We define learned helplessness in academic situations as a negative reactionary mindset toward new learning situations based on a student’s faulty interpretation of past failure in cognitive, psychological, and/or behavioral realms. In other words, in these experiences of failure, students learn to not try or to quit trying.

Construct Definition In a statistics class, for example, learned helplessness might be seen in students who do not believe they can grasp the material due to a failure to learn similar material earlier in the course or their academic history. Such students could manifest this helplessness in a variety of ways, negative self-talk, pessimism, inability to concentrate, test anxiety, emotional breakdowns, anger, frustration, shyness, giving up on a task, and so on.

Instrument Development 1. Exploratory phase 2. Development of the instrument including face and content validity, item analysis, and reliability 3. First administration with related instruments (approximately 400 subjects (undergraduate & graduate) enrolled in statistics courses and from a subject pool) 4. Data clean up and factor analysis (EFA) 5. Second administration with related instruments (approximately 320 subjects enrolled in statistics courses and from a subject pool) 6. CFA analysis

Final Scale 14 -item measure/ 5 -point Likert type Coefficient alpha consistently above 0. 90 EFA confirmation of unidimensionality CFA fit indices indicate good fit Convergent/divergent validity consistent with related/un-related measures • In process of submitting results to journal • • •

Sample Items • If I complete statistics assignments successfully it is probably because I was lucky. • When I do statistics my energy seems depleted. • In statistics, I think I may as well give up because there’s nothing I can do about making things better for myself.

Future Research • Guidelines for interpreting scores • Comparison among various groups (e. g. , undergrad vs. grad, male vs. female, and so on) • Relationship with other constructs (e. g. , anxiety, stress, math ability, and so on) • Learned optimism? !

Questions?