Teachers’ Attributions of Causality, Control and Responsibility in Respect of Difficult Pupil Behaviour and its Successful Management

Abstract

It is now almost a quarter of a century since the publication of the first paper demonstrating the effects of a behavioural approach within a British school setting (Ward, 1971). In the intervening period, a succession of papers, mostly in the form of case studies, have extended such work. However, accounts have also frequently drawn attention to the fact that such methods do not always correspond with teachers’ more intuitive approaches to the behaviour of pupils they deem difficult to manage. This paper considers the various attempts that have been made to synthesise behavioural approaches with other theoretical frameworks in order to understand better these recurring problems of implementation within educational settings. One prominent psychological perspective that has been relatively neglected from these considerations is that of attribution theory. This paper reports on an interview study of 24 primary age‐range teachers who had successfully adopted a behavioural approach to a difficult pupil in consultation with an educational psychologist (EP). An analysis is made of these teachers’ attributions for the origins of the pupils’ behaviour and for the improvements that are achieved. The results indicate that different models of attribution are applied by the teachers to the pupils, parents and themselves, suggesting that for sustained and generalisable improvements, EPs may need to take a much more explicit and detailed approach to teachers’ construing of difficult behaviour as well as their actions in response to it.