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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
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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
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 • Exploratory phase • Development of the instrument including face and content validity, item analysis, and reliability • First administration with related instruments (approximately 400 subjects (undergraduate & graduate) enrolled in statistics courses and from a subject pool) • Data clean up and factor analysis (EFA) • Second administration with related instruments (approximately 320 subjects enrolled in statistics courses and from a subject pool) • 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?!
