Which of the following is true of the findings of studies on explanatory styles

Explanatory style reflects the way that people habitually explain disparate bad or good events (e.g., Peterson, 2000, Peterson and Steen, 2002). People who usually explain bad events with causes that are stable over time (“it’s going to last forever”), global in effect (“it’s going to undercut everything that I do”), and internal (“it’s me”) and who explain good events with unstable, specific, and external causes are said to have a pessimistic explanatory style.1 People with the opposite attributional pattern are said to have an optimistic explanatory style. Explanatory style has been extensively investigated as a correlate of many outcomes such as depression (e.g., Volpe & Levin, 1998), physical health (e.g., Dua, 1995), illness (e.g., Jackson, Sellers, & Peterson, 2002), as well as athletic (e.g., Martin-Krumm, Sarrazin, Peterson, & Famose, 2003) and occupational (e.g., Corr & Gray, 1995) performance.

The study of explanatory style in the field of education has also received a considerable amount of attention (see Houston, 1994, for review). Following predictions of the reformulated model of learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978), researchers have tested the hypothesis that a pessimistic explanatory style increases the probability of learned helplessness. For example Peterson and Barrett (1987) measured college students’ explanatory style during the first two weeks of the academic year. They found that students with a pessimistic style performed worse than those with an optimistic style (in terms of grade point average at the end of the academic year). Nevertheless, since this study has been conducted, other investigations have yielded inconsistent results. Some of them support a positive link between a pessimistic explanatory style and academic failure (e.g., Henry et al., 1993, Petripin and Johnson, 1991), others found no such link (e.g., Bridges, 2001, Fazio and Palm, 1998, Tiggemann and Crowley, 1993), and still others found the opposite association (e.g., Houston, 1994).

If it is possible to invoke some differences between participants or procedures to account for these divergent results, other explanations exist. In accordance with helplessness theory, it is possible that explanatory style functions only as a “distal” variable—a mere risk factor among others (e.g., Peterson & Park, 1998). However, most studies treat explanatory style as a direct predictor of academic success. It is not surprising that controlling for variables which directly influence academic performance—as, for example, aptitude (e.g., Bridges, 2001)—mitigates the effect of explanatory style. It may also be that explanatory style interacts with other variables responsible for the motivational processes at school, increasing or decreasing their effects on academic success. Accordingly the present study attempted to integrate explanatory style and an academic motivation model.

Eccles and her colleagues’ model is particularly useful in predicting behavior at school (e.g., Eccles et al., 1983, Eccles and Wigfield, 2002). According to it, success expectancies and subjective task value are the two most immediate predictors of achievement behavior like task choices, persistence in an activity, strength involvement, and performance (see for a review Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). Expectancies for success are defined as individuals’ beliefs about how well they will do on upcoming tasks (see Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). According to Eccles et al.’s model (1983), they are influenced by goals and more general self-schemata. In this study, we focused only on self-views in discrete and specific areas, namely the self-concept of one’s ability in a subject because particular beliefs are generally better predictors of behavior than general beliefs (e.g., Pajares & Schunk, 2001). Self-concept of one’s ability, or perceived ability, can be defined as an individual perception of the actual competence in a particular subject (e.g., Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). Thus, the concepts of success expectancies and perceived ability can be distinguished insofar as the latter corresponds to the ability at a given moment in a general domain (e.g., the “sport”, or a particular kind of sport), whereas the formers are “projections” (thus focused on future) onto someone’s capacity to succeed in a particular task or activity.

Eccles and her colleagues (1983) defined task value in terms of four major components: (a) intrinsic value (enjoyment of the activity), (b) utility value (usefulness of the task in terms of current and future goals), (c) attainment value (personal importance of doing well at the task), and (d) cost (perceived negative aspects of engaging in the task). Among the different antecedents of subjective task value, Eccles et al. again underlined the importance of goals and more general self-schemata. For example, McIver, Stipek, and Daniels (1991) showed that changes in students’ (aged 12–15 years) perceived ability over one semester predicted changes in their interest for subject matter, much more than the reverse. In short, according to Eccles et al.’s model, the student who perceives high ability will develop high success expectancies and high subjective task value, which in turn will positively influence his/her grade point average. Conversely, the dynamics will be negative for a student who perceives low ability in this subject.

We were especially interested in the nature of this hypothesized negative spiral. Is a low perceived ability student expected to have only low success expectancies and subjective task value? We think this process may be more complex, and that perceived ability interacts with explanatory style to predict success expectancies and subjective task value, as shown by the dotted arrows on Fig. 1 which summarizes the theoretical model of this study. If a high perceived ability is associated with high success expectancies and task value, we further expected that explanatory style would moderate the harmful consequences of low perceived ability. A pessimistic explanatory style coupled with low perceived ability should lead to poorer success expectancies and task value than in the case for which low perceived ability is associated with an optimistic explanatory style. Indeed, we think that students who feel incompetent in physical education (PE) at the beginning of the school year, but who think this condition to be transitory and circumscribed (i.e., the optimistic students) will attend to progress during the academic year. These opportunities will result in more increased success expectancies and task value than those who consider this condition to be chronic and pervasive (i.e. the pessimistic students).

In summary, the present research was conducted in PE classes and had two primary aims. The first one was to test in a prospective design the moderating effects of the explanatory style on the relationships between students’ perceived ability and their success expectancies and subjective task value in PE. More precisely, we expected that explanatory style would interact with perceived ability to predict success expectancies and subjective task value: (a) an optimistic style inhibits the effects of a low perceived ability on success expectations and subjective task value, (b) a pessimistic style exacerbates the effects of a low perceived ability on success expectations and subjective task value.

The second aim was to test the possibility that explanatory style has only distal effects on outcomes. We expected that its influence on students’ achievement would be mediated by more proximal variables: success expectancies and subjective task value (see Fig. 1).

Participants and procedure

Seventy-four boys and 108 girls aged 13–15 (M = 14 years, SD = 0.86) agreed to participate in the study which was described to them as dealing with motivation at school. They were registered in 10 forms (8th and 9th grade) from a secondary school in France. Parental and school administrator permissions were requested before starting the investigation. At the beginning of the academic year, participants filled in a questionnaire assessing their explanatory style and their perceived ability in PE.

Analyses

Two sets of analyses were carried out to test the hypotheses. Hierarchical regression models were first used to test the moderating effects of the explanatory style on the links between perceived ability and success expectations or subjective task value.

Discussion

This study was designed to explore (a) whether ES moderates the effect of perceived ability on students’ expectancies and subjective task value, and (b) the mediating effects of success expectancies and subjective task value in the relationships between ES and students’ grade in physical education classes.

First, in accordance with former studies in the field of moderating effects played by the explanatory style (Jackson et al., 2002), the results showed that explanatory style interacted with

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