This is a process by which a person (student) is led to reflect on his/her own attributions for a situation and consider alternative explanations. For those who resolve disputes, either professionally or informally, we might be surprised to know that we do attributional retraining all the time. We naturally raise other explanations for the conflict behaviour and help information to be exchanged that might change assumptions and perceptions. However, we do it unconsciously, without being deliberate about it.1
Attributional retraining programs produce changes on the cognitive and behavioural level, i.e., they typically increase the subjects' attributions for failure to lack of effort, and they improve performance as well as persistence. Reattribution training could become an important aspect of cognitive therapy.2
Causal attributions for success and failure have a significant impact on motivation, emotions and achievement. Attributional retraining (AR) is a remedial intervention based on this premise that assists by encouraging controllable attributions for poor performance.
This technique will consistently produce modest increase in motivation and performance of students which in turn will raise their self efficacy.