Teachers facing school failure: the social valorization of effort in the school context.

This paper describes two studies concerning teachers’ classroom interventions facing school failure. The role of two main variables is investigated: the lack of effort as a cause of failure students are held responsible for by teachers, and teacher’s social representations of intelligence. The first study (Study 1) explored the impact of “lack of effort” causal attribution for student’s failure on the intervention strategies adopted by 122 high school teachers. Study 2 analyzed the impact of social representations of intelligence, held by 202 high school teachers, on “lack of effort” causal inference and on behavioral interventions. Results highlight that teachers mostly choose more severe educational interventions with retributive purpose when failure is ascribable to an absence of effort expenditure by the student. Moreover, the findings support the role of teachers’ social representations of intelligence in failure explanations and in educational practices, showing that “lack of effort” attribution and practices with retributive purpose are predicted by the social representation of intelligence “as a gift”. Results are analysed and discussed by considering the effort as a normative parameter of the school environment.