Causal attributions of teachers and parents regarding children's performance

Nine upper elementary teachers assigned equal numbers of children from their own classrooms to three performance categories: Low Performance, Moderate Performance and High Performance. A child's teacher and his or her parent (usually the mother) then completed structured and open-ended questions regarding the reasons why the child performed as he did. While teachers rated child's ability, own teaching, and mother, father and peer influence higher and other reasons (e.g., health, situational characteristics) lower for high performing than for low performing children on structured questions, parents of children in the different conditions did not differ significantly in their ratings on each factor. On both open-ended and structured questions, for all performance levels, teaching was rated as more important by parents than by teachers.