Why Are My Students Acting Like This? Exploring Preservice Teachers' Attributions of Student Behavior

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 5
  In Poster Session: Division K Section 6 Poster Session

Abstract

Seeking to understand how a group of student teaching interns (N=27) make meaning of student behavior in their elementary classrooms, this qualitative study examines the potential effects of attribution theories on interns’ agency and power. In analyzing a set of weekly reflection writing, we investigate the kinds of attributions assigned by interns to explain students’ behavior in their elementary classrooms. The logic model for this research grows out of the psychological notion that humans seek to make sense of and explain their experiences, conceptualized within attribution theory and phenomenological causality. Findings indicate interns tended to attribute student behaviors to both internal and external factors, and importantly, distinguished instances when they felt themselves efficacious to act on and affect students’ behavior.

Authors

• Julianna E. Lopez Kershen, Independent Scholar

• Aiyana Henry, University of Oklahoma