Developmental Brown Bag

Katja Natale, Ph.D., Visiting Post Doc Researcher, Institute for Social Research

Monday, November 16, 2009, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
3048  East Hall

Event Information

Abstract

Parents and teachers start to explain and evaluate children’s academic successes and failure already early on the children’s school career. The most typical causal attributions to which parents and teachers refer when explaining children’s achievement are ability, effort, task difficulty, and teachers’ or parents’ help, or, in case of failure, lack of them. The purpose of this presentation is to provide information about how parents’ and teachers’ causal attributions change during the children’s school years, and how they may predict children’s performance and motivation. In addition, several antecedents of parents’ and teachers’ causal attributions will be discussed further.

Three of the data sets described here have been gathered in Finland, at the Center of Excellence in Learning and Motivation, University of Jyväskylä. All of them have followed children from kindergarten to their first primary school grades, and two of them included parents, and one of them included teachers as well. The fourth data set has been gathered in Michigan, and it included both parents and teachers of kindergarten to sixth grade children.
The results of the studies showed that parents’ causal attributions change especially during the children’s transition from kindergarten to primary school. Later on, both parents’ and teachers’ attributions become more stable. Mothers and fathers of the same families typically share their beliefs, and the antecedents of their beliefs are similar. In Finland, especially parents’ ability attributions are associated with children’s good performance later on. In America, teachers’ ability beliefs, in turn, predict children’s high self-concept of ability in math and reading.

Bio 

Ph.D. Katja Natale is a visiting post doc researcher at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), where she is working at the research group of Prof. Jacquelynne Eccles. Katja got her Ph.D. in 2007 at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. For her Ph.D. thesis she was studying parents’ causal attributions, and particularly what parents think about their children’s success and failure at school and how these parental beliefs are associated with children’s academic performance and self-concept. After finishing her Ph.D. Katja continued doing research in the same field, however, now concentrating more on the teacher-student interaction. That is her research topic also at the University of Michigan.

Katja is also interested in knowing more about cultural differences in how family and school influence on students’ learning, as well as in the development and changes in students’ motivation, and she is looking forward of studying them in the near future in the data sets gathered in America and Finland, as well as in a pilot data set she is currently collecting in Chile.

Recently Katja published a paper “The Role of Children's School Performance in Their Parents' Ability and Effort Attributions: A Longitudinal Study” in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, and another one “Cross-lagged Associations between Kindergarten Teachers’ Causal Attributions and Children’s Task Motivation and Performance in Reading” in Educational Psychology.