The helpless learner: a pilot study in clinical students

Attribution style has been used as a measure of learned helplessness. Those who perceive bad events to be pervasive, permanent and caused by themselves become hopeless and depressed and may give up trying. The aim of this study was to measure changes in students' attribution style and autonomy during a clinical attachment and to establish its relationship with achievement in examinations. We developed a reliable Medical Education Attribution Style Questionnaire and used it to show that students increasingly accepted responsibility for adverse events during the attachment. Students who performed worst in subsequent examinations were those with a 'helpless' attribution style. These results suggest that learning environments where adverse events are perceived as being pervasive and inalterable will prevent the development of the autonomous learner and impair student achievement.