Effects of attribution training on the assembly task performance of mentally retarded adults.

A training program was designed to teach mentally retarded adults working in sheltered workshops to attribute their success on various assembly tasks to high effort and ability and their failure to lack of effort. These subjects were judged as having motivational problems and also demonstrated decreased levels of performance on assembly tasks following failure experience. They received either individual attribution training, group filmstrip attribution training, or were placed in a control condition. Only the attribution-trained subjects subsequently exhibited more positive reactions to failure, increasing their performance speed in the face of failure. Both training conditions were effective, although filmstrip training was somewhat more beneficial than was individual training.