Failure Syndrome Students (continued)

These teachers would make it clear to failure syndrome students that they were expected to work conscientiously and persistently so as to turn in work done completely and correctly, but they would also provide help if needed, reassure them that they would not be given work that they could not do, monitor their progress and provide any needed assistance, and reinforce them by praising their successes, calling attention to their progress, and providing them with opportunities to display their accomplishments publicly. This special treatment would be faded gradually as the students gained confidence and began to work more persistently and independently. These strategies are in line with what is known about cognitive retraining. 

Brophy (1998) found that highly effective teachers and other teachers generally implemented similar strategies to help failure syndrome students--such as including encouragement and shaping strategies in their responses to the student, engaging in supportive behaviors, providing reassurance, and making personal appeals to the student to improve performance. But the higher-rated, more-effective teachers appeared to place greater emphasis on insisting on better effort and seemed to have greater confidence that the improvements the student could achieve would be stable over time rather than merely temporary. They tended to assume that the demands made on students were appropriate (and therefore that failure syndrome problems stemmed from the students' mistakenly pessimistic attributions and self-efficacy perceptions), while lower-rated teachers were more likely to fear that their task demands were too difficult for the student to handle. 

Dweck and Elliott (1983) argued that students who have developed an "entity" view of ability (e.g, who see it as fixed and limited) stand to benefit from direct training designed to shift them to an "incremental" view (e.g., seeing ability as something that can be developed through practice). 

Teacher behaviors that encourage incremental rather than entity views of ability include: 

•  acting more as resource persons than as judges, 

•  focusing students more on learning processes than on outcomes, 

•  reacting to errors as natural and useful parts of the learning process rather than as evidence of failure, 

•  stressing effort over ability and personal standards over normative standards when giving feedback, and 

•  attempting to stimulate achievement efforts through primarily intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivational strategies. 

Conclusion

In summary, failure syndrome students approach assignments with very low expectations of success and tend to give up at early signs of difficulty. Many teachers use strategies with these students that are in line with what we know about cognitive retraining strategies such as attribution training, efficacy training, and strategy training. Teachers' effectiveness can be enhanced, however, if they use modeling to teach coping strategies, especially techniques for persisting in the face of frustration or failure.