QUEST, 1996,48,409-421 O 1996 American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education

Fostering Hope in Youth: A Model for Explaining Learned

Helplessness in Physical Activity

Thomas J. Martinek

Hope is the power that gives a person confidence to step out and try. -Zig Ziglar

Greek mythology tells us how Zeus sent to earth the goddess Pandora with a mysterious box. She had been forbidden to open it, but could not restrain her curi- osity and one day lifted the lid. At once a multitude of little winged monsters rushed out and escaped. They were Disease, Envy, Anger, Revenge, and all the other evils that brought the Golden Age of Greece to an end and left its people suffering and unhappy. Only one winged creature, white and shining, remained in the box. As its name was Hope, Pandora let it escape also, in order that she might make up to man and woman for the evils which had been let loose in the world.

For all of us, the notion of having hope brings to us an energizing spirit to continue on even in the face of adversity. Setbacks are only temporary for those who have hope, and usually only occur in specific situations. Hope allows us to view bad situations as "quirks" in life; we see them as challenges that make us try harder. Unfortunately, many individuals lack the redeeming qualities of hope and believe they have little or no control over life's defeats. At the core of such pessi- mism is the phenomenon of learned helplessness. According to Seligman (1990) helplessness is a state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what is happening. It is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.

Genesis of Learned Helplessness Research

In 1957 the first piece of research on learned helplessness was reported by Richter. His intent was to develop a model of hopelessness to explain the sudden- death phenomenon in animals (which he also linked to humans). He found that rats quickly drowned after being placed into "swimming jars" filled with water at cer- tain temperatures. He then pretreated the rats by placing them in the jars and then removing them within a short time. After doing this several times he noticed that the rats were able to significantly increase their swimming time. Richter used the concept of hopelessness, or lack of control over a situation, to explain the rats' rapid demise when not pretreated. According to the researcher, by immersing and

Thomas J. Martinek is with the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27412.

410 MARTINEK

removing the rats from the water, he had "taught" them that the situation was not hopeless.

Ten years later, Martin Seligman and a graduate student, Steve Maier, ex- tended Richter's research to help explain the learned helpless phenomenon with mongrel dogs (Seligman & Maier, 1967). They administered a classical condition- ing treatment of extinguished lights followed by weakelectrical shocks to the dogs. Animals in the "escape" group could terminate the shocks by pressing a panel in the testing apparatus with their nose. Those in the "yoked group could not escape (i.e., the shocks could not be turned off by pressing the panel). Eventually the dogs were placed in a two-sided chamber designed so that shock could be avoided by jumping from one side to the other. The majority of yoked dogs made few attempts to jump over, and some soon lay down and whined, passively accepting the shocks. The pretreated dogs, however, avoided shock altogether by jumping to the other side after receiving the conditional stimulus. Similar to Richter's findings, Seligman and Maier were able to teach the dogs survival behavior.

The phenomenon of learned helplessness was subsequently studied in hu- mans. In 1971, Donald Hiroto attempted to study the response of humans to condi- tions similar to those created in Seligman's animal studies (Hiroto, 1974). He first took one group of people into a room, turned on a loud noise, and gave them the task of trying to turn it off. Apanel of buttons could be pushed in various combina- tions, but the noise was unstoppable. Another group of subjects could stop the noise by pressing the right pattern of buttons. A third group was subjected to no noise at all.

Afterward, Hiroto brought the subjects to another room with a shuttle box. If they put their hand on one side, an annoying sound was created. If the hand was placed on the other, the noise ceased. He found that two-thirds of the ones who were trained to be helpless did not try to stop the noise. Those who first got the escapable noise or no noise learned to turn off the noise quickly. Like Seligman with his dogs, Hiroto created a learned helpless condition in some of his subjects.

Later, Hiroto and Seligman (1975) showed learned helplessness to be gener- alized across a variety of tasks. This was accomplished by employing several pre- treatments with two tasks (shuttle-box escape and anagram-solution testing). Four simultaneous experiments were conducted with college graduate students. They were exposed to inescapable, escapable, or control tones or discrimination prob- lems. This was followed by a shuttlebox-escape or anagram-solution test.. Learned helplessness was found in all experiments. That is, the subjects pretreated with unsolvable puzzles or inescapable aversive tones failed to solve the puzzles or to avoid tones when they were able to do so.

These results led the researchers to surmise that learned helplessness may be the rudiment of a trait. There may be evidence then that a learned helpless orienta- tion may be found across numerous contexts. These conclusions led researchers to look at the construct in achievement situations, especially the ciassroom.

Nolen-Hokesema, Girgus, and Seligman (1986), for example, collected data from 168 third, fourth, and fifth graders. The information included standardized test scores and learned helpless ratings by the teacher and each student's symp- toms of depression. They found all of these variables to be significantly correlated, demonstrating the pervasive influence of this orientation on an individual's achieve- ment and behavior. In a later study, Fincham, Hokoda, and Sanders (1989) found third graders' helplessness (based on teachers' ratings) to be significantly related

FOSTERING HOPE IN YOUTH 41 1

to fifth-grade achievement-test scores. They also found that teachers were accu- rate in determining the degree of learned helplessness in their students.

Much of the research on learned helplessness has been relegated to the class- room setting. Little research has looked at the construct within the context of physi- cal activity. Furthermore, most of the research has focused on the manifestations of learned helplessness instead of its actual causes (Seligman, 1990). Little is known as to why some individuals can overcome helpless feelings while others fall vic- tim to the disposition in a permanent and pervasive way. Although research in physical education and sport has attempted to explain why certain individuals strive to achieve at certain things, little has been done in looking at those who are psy- chologically crippled with feelings of total helplessness.

The purpose of this article is to provide a model describing how learned helplessness is acquired and why degrees of learned helplessness vary from indi- vidual to individual. Additionally, various strategies will be suggested that can abate learned helplessness. The model should also serve as a framework from which future research on learned helplessness can be conceptualized and conducted.

The Proposed Model

The tenets of the model suggest that (a) all individuals have a need to gain control over achievement and social outcomes, (b) controllability is mediated by significant others and environmental conditions, (c) controllability determines in- dividual explanatory styles, and (d) explanatory styles influence learned helpless behavior. Figure 1 illustrates the model and the relationship of the four areas. In order for the reader to understand its operational characteristics, the following sections will address various aspects of the model.

Need to Gain Control Over Outcomes

All individuals have a need to control the various events occurring in their lives. Many things, however, are beyond our control, such as the weather, skin and

of Control

Behavior of Others Teacher Expectations Pewasiveness

Social Contexts Permanence

Degree of Learned

Figure 1 - Model for Explaining Learned Helplessness in Physical Activity.

hair color, and seasons of the year. But there is a vast temtory of actions that we do have control over. These actions are reflected in the way we lead our lives, how we deal with others, how we earn a living, and so forth. All of these aspects are nor- mally determined by some degree of choice. Because of advances in technology and mass communication, people are able to have a significant measure of choice and therefore personal control over their lives. Not the least of which of these choices is the way we think. By and large we welcome that control.

This need to make choices and have control is especially keen in young children. Youngsters are quite anxious to seek positive (and negative) responses from significant others (parentslguardians, siblings, aunts, uncles, etc.); children seek the reactions of these significant others by doing numerous deeds. And for the most part, responses from significant others are fairly predictable in reinforcing a child's sense of control. Having this control is central to maintaining an optimistic attitude toward life. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that most youngsters in the early grades appear to be very optimistic about having control over their future (both immediate and long range). They also believe that most setbacks are only temporary. The sense of helplessness is rarely experienced (Seligman, 1990; Ziglar, 1985).

Unfortunately, as children grow older, some begin to question their ability to control outcomes. Kids basically enter school with the belief they have a positive future ahead of them. There is nothing they can't do! Seligman (1990) believes that evolution has insured this optimism. Nature has insured that youth reach pu- berty safely and that a next generation is produced. In essence nature has inocu- lated them psychologically.

As kids get to be 7 or 8 years old, however, some of them begin to experi- ence self-doubt about the future. According to Ziglar (1985) it is about this age that students begin to take either an optimistic or pessimistic view of their world. For some, the early seeds of helplessness appear to have been planted. It is during this time that child depression becomes evident. One indicator of this is child sui- cide. Although nearly nonexistent below the age of seven, the occurrence of this tragic act in older children is on the increase (Benson, 1993). This provides evi- dence that even young children can fall prey to depression and hopelessness. But why do some children lose control and suffer the pangs of depression? Where did the helplessness come from and how can it be prevented? In order to effectively answer these questions, a clearer understanding of how controllability is mediated is needed.

Mediators of Controllability

A clearer understanding of the learned helplessness phenomenon cannot take place unless one looks at the mediators of controllability. Specifically, the behav- ior of others, teacher and coach expectations, and social context all represent sa- lient factors that mediate perceptions of controllability.

Behavior of Others. Children are constantly asking "why?" in order to understand the world around them. Getting the answers from parents helps them to intellectually mature. When the answers are not available they will seek other ways of getting the answer. The most dominant way is by observing and listening. Young children have their antennae out to tune in to the way their parents, particu- larly the mother, respond to various events. This has special implications when a parent is explaining the reasons for the occurrence of personal experience. Take,

FOSTERING HOPE W YOUTH 413

for example, the reaction of a mother to a bad event in the presence of her son. The scene takes place in a parking lot of a grocery store where the mother has just locked herself out of her car.

Son: Mommy, do you want me to get someone? Mom: Damn it! This is incredible . . . your father is going to kill me. Son: Gosh, Daddy always said to check first before locking the car. Mom: Damn, things like this always happen to me. I am so dumb. All I want to do is a little shopping. This happens to me all the time. What a klutz I am!!

In this story the mom is saying some pretty negative things about herself. In explaining this unfortunate event the child sees that the mother is blaming herself and that the reasons for the event are due to things that are trait-like: (a) this always happen to me, (b) I am so dumb, and (c) What a klutz I am. The son is listening to reasons that are pervasive and uncontrollable. Over time such explanations will have a marked impact on the way he will explain events that happen to him.

I have seen similar impressions communicated during parent-teacher con- ferences. For example, during a visit to a school where I was doing some staff development work, I overheard a discussion that a physical education teacher was having with a parent of a 12-year-old daughter. The child was having trouble in class and was unable to physically keep up with her classmates. The teacher was trying to encourage the mother to work with her daughter on some of the things they were doing in class. The mother then blurted out "Are you kidding? I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time! I was never good in sports . . . I mean I was a real motor moron. So it's no wonder she is having such difficulty."

Dismantling negative mirror impressions will require heightened sensitivity of parents and significant others to the way they respond to their own life events. To do this, teachers and coaches should make parents and other caregivers mindful of what they say in front of their children. They should be encouraged to attribute bad events to temporary factors rather than a trait condition. Self-derogation will only reinforce the child's self-doubt about his or her ability.

Teacher/Coach Expectations. Another powerful mediator of control is the expectations of significant others. Teachers and coaches are especially important in the communication of expectations. They have learned through experience that, more often than not, what they expect from their students is usually what they get in performance. In turn, research has shown teacher expectancy effects to be a powerful motivator of students' behavior (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). Expecta- tions are communicated mostly through various types of experiences provided by the teacher. Embedded in these experiences are successes and failures that ulti- mately affect learned helpless feelings. If students learn that their responses in a classroom setting have nothing to do with the outcome, most will eventually give up. The teacher's expectations may be so strong and inflexible that no matter how hard students try, the interpretation of results by the teacher will always be the same. Because of the widespread emphasis on accountability in teaching, there has been an increase of norm-referenced testing in our schools. Consequently, the problem of stereotyping youngsters through early labeling or diagnosis could reach alarming proportions. Early testing, even in kindergarten children, creates a "men- tal set of expectations for the child's ability." One may logically ask, therefore, can such expectations induce or exacerbate learned helpless feelings? The possibili- ties of this are illustrated in the following story.

Tommy was an average first-grade boy who took a reading achievement test for second-grade group placement. Tommy mistakenly used the wrong section of his IBM answer sheet and scored somewhere in the 5th percentile. Consequently, he was scheduled to work with the "slow-reading" group during the second grade. Needless to say, his motivation in reading was low, as were his own expectations regarding other academic areas. His behavior was ultimately affected, and he be- came a disruptive student.

Interestingly, when Tommy took the achievement test the following year (without mistakes), he scored at the appropriate level of his reading group. Again, he was placed in the low reading group. His teachers simply did not believe that such a turn around was possible for Tommy.

Several studies in physical education and sport appear to support the notion that teacher expectations have a profound effect on students' sense of control. To test this hypothesis, Susan Johnson, a graduate student of mine, and I conducted a study to look at this relationship. Although we did not examine learned helpless- ness per se, we did look at its corollary, global self-concept (Martinek & Johnson, 1979). Fourth- and fifth-grade children were rated by their teachers according to their expectations for student performance in physical education. In addition, a self-concept measure was administered. The results of the study showed that not only did the high-expectancy students have more positive self-concepts than low- expectancy students, teachers gave the high-expectancy students more contact time, encouragement, and acceptance.

In a follow-up study, the relationship between student expectations and teacher expectations was examined (Martinek, 1980). It was believed that another mani- festation of controllability was the student's expectation for future success in vari- ous learning tasks. This time groups of third- and fourth-grade children were rated by their teacher according to what she expected each student to do in terms of physical performance. The students were also given a scale (Johnson, 1979) that measured their expectation of success on various motor tasks in elementary physi- cal education. The results showed that teacher expectations significantly corre- lated to the students' expectations. This indicated that students with low expecta- tions of obtaining future success in motor performance might be less apt to perse- vere on most learning tasks. In fact, anecdotal records showed that students with exceptionally low expectations used primitive or inappropriate response strategies in an effort to camouflage their feelings of inadequacy (Martinek, 1980).

Another unfortunate outcome of learned helplessness is low task persistence. Some studies have shown that low teacher expectations impact on how hard kids try during instruction (Martinek & Karper, 1982, 1984a). For example, in one study, elementary students who were classified as low-expectancy students by their teacher, were found to exert significantly less effort in their motor tasks than their high-expectancy counterparts. The relationship between expectations and effort was found to be especially strong when the instructional climate was more com- petitive (Martinek & Karper, 1984b). This was due, in part, to the emphasis on performance goals and social comparisons inherent in competitive settings (Ames, 1992).

Similar findings were also reported by Horn (1 985) for junior high softball players. Low-expectancy students exhibited less effort and quality in skill perfor- mance. Teachers were also found to give more noncontingent praise to the low- expectancy students. That is, the praise was given regardless of how well they did.

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Since praise had little to do with the levels of performance, low-expectancy stu- dents took little responsibility or control over their coaches' evaluation.

Social Context. Another mediator of controliability is the social context in which students live and go to school. Where kids live probably has one of the most significant impacts on their outlook toward a possible future (Kozol, 1991 ). With the recent emphasis on children "at risk," the importance of understanding the environmental conditions of urban children is especially profound. The need for ownership in their future is largely determined by an autonomous will to either change the living conditions or to become an effective problem solver. In his book, Savage Inequalities, Jonothan Kozol provides a provocative profile of students raised in the impoverished areas of our nation's cities. He believes that for children who are reared in impoverished, underserved environments, controllability be- comes a central issue for survival. For many underserved children, little hope is seen for changing their social and economic position. The fact that over 50% of the students in urban schools fail to pursue schooling beyond middle school attests to the devastating effects of uncontrollability and helplessness. Even teachers who teach in these impoverished areas lose a sense of hope. Low expectations, terrible teaching conditions, lack of resources, oppositional behavior, and parental indif- ference have put the teachers of underserved students at risk. Consequently, many teachers put their students in "holding patterns" because they too have fallen vic- tims to helplessness (Kozol, 1991). The student, therefore, is placed in double jeopardy. Both environment and teachers provide little optimism for success.

The social context of achievement situations can also have an effect on per- ceptions of competence and affect (e.g., Ames, 1984; Fincham, Hokoda, & Sand- ers, 1989). Competitive or individual learning climates usually prevail in the schools. Although individual ability is a central attribute in both climates, competitive cli- mates tend to socially compare ability levels, whereas individual climates try to enhance them (Ames, 1992). Therefore, social and norm comparisons in competi- tive climates accentuate low ability. Over time, students begin to view their inabil- ity as a permanent trait, with little chance of ever being successful. On the other hand, if the climate is individualized, low ability is viewed as only temporary and the belief prevails that hard work and persistence will eventually pay off.

The effects of individual and competitive social climates have been studied in both classroom and physical activity settings. For example, Ames (1984) stud- ied the effect of competitive and individualist goal structures on children's achieve- ment attributions and self-instructions. By intentionally creating the two climates for problem-solving tasks, she found that fifth and sixth graders became more learned helpless in the competitive climate than in the individual one. Those in the individual learning group focused more on figuring out possible solutions to the problem; they demonstrated more stick-to-itiveness.

Physical education and sport may provide one of the most normative con- texts in the school (Martinek & Griffith, 1994; Walling & Martinek, 1995). There are two factors that account for this. First, physical education and sport provide an arena in which children are required to display their skill prowess. Goodlad's (1984) early study on schooling indicated that the emphasis on competitive sport forms in middle school programs appeared to focus on the importance of athletic ability. Consequently, self-evaluations are often made through social comparisons with other classmates. This public display of a student's low skills often reinforces low self-perceptions. For students who believe they have the ability to succeed, physical

education and sport provide opportunities to challenge their skillfulness. For stu- dents who doubt their ability, the achievement climate gives them little faith in experiencing success.

Explanatory Styles and Pervasive Learned Helplessness

Seligman's experiment, referred to earlier, showed how helplessness could be induced in mongrel dogs. Although many of the pretreated dogs became learned helpless, there were some that did not. Were these dogs impervious to learned helpless conditions? If so, why did they resist the treatment (inescapable shock)?

According to Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978), the degree to which people become helpless to bad events depends on their explanatory style. An ex- planatory style is the way people explain the reasons for different things that hap- pen to them. This is based, in part, on attribution theory born out of the work of Fritz Heider (1958) and later expanded upon by Bernard Weiner (1974). Attribu- tion theory helps to explain the causes of success and failure. They are explained along two dimensions of control-internal and external. Ability and effort are causes that come from within a person, whereas task difficulty and luck are external. In addition, ability and task difficulty are more or less stable factors, whereas effort and luck situations are variable.

Abramson and her colleagues reformulated Weiner's theory in two signifi- cant ways. First, their theory explains the "habits" of explaining things as opposed to a single attribution made for one specific failure or success. Accordingly, all individuals have a "style" for explaining the causes of life events. These habits are readily used to make sense of one's world. Second, although Weiner (1974,1986) talks about the permanence of the attributions made for outcomes, theirpervasive- ness is not addressed. The dimensions of permanence and pervasiveness are two key factors that determine an individual's vulnerability to becoming learned help- less. Figure 2 shows the relationship of permanence and pervasive dimensions to varying degrees of learned helplessness that one can acquire.

Mastery Oriented

Learned Helpless

E x p l a n a t o r y Styles ,-b

Temporary & Permanent & Permanent & Specific Specific Pervasive

Figure 2 - Mediators of Explanatory Styles.

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Recall that a learned helpless person is one who uses lack of ability (a stable trait) as the reason for failure. The pervasiveness and permanence of this attribute will determine the extent to which a person becomes learned helpless (Seligman, 1990). Accordingly, explanatory styles can reflect learned helplessness in three ways: (a) temporary and situation specific, (b) permanent and situation specific, and (c) permanent and pervasive.

Temporary/Specific Explanatory Style. Everyone has encountered failure and has felt temporarily learned helpless from the experience. In having a tempo- rary/specific explanatory style, the individual sees failure as only temporary for a given situation.

For example, I remember how I felt when I first had a manuscript rejected for publication. I thought that all the work that had gone into the study was done in vain. I dwelled on this for several days and finally decided to go back and look at the reviewers' comments. Among the criticisms were some excellent recommen- dations for doing the study again. Later, guided by the reviewers' comments, I restructured the study and felt better about its design and potential contribution. To my delight, the paper was published! Although my initial response to rejection was one of helplessness, I viewed it only as a temporary setback, and therefore I could change the situation around.

In physical education, we often see similar reactions when students react to an assessment of their skill. Consider the example of a student who takes a volley- ball skills test and does very poorly on it. Although she thinks that her low score was due to lack of ability, she may also see this as only temporary; there is not much she can do to change her score at that moment. Although this was the first time she had played volleyball, she may feel she will do better next time with practice. This kind of explanatory style is an optimistic one. Dweck (1986) charac- terizes this type of response as mastery oriented. Mastery oriented students in physical education frequently demonstrate high levels of persistence and view fail- ure as only temporary. In fact, they view failure as a challenge. They believe that by trying harder, success is tenable (Dweck, 1975; Martinek & Griffith, 1994; Martinek & Williams, 1995).

Pemzanent/Speci$c Explanatory Style. For some, learned helplessness seems permanent, but only for certain situations. For example, there is a friend of mine who is an excellent basketball and baseball player. He is an extremely ag- gressive player in both sports and always plays to win. Even on days when he doesn't do well, he looks forward to the next game because he knows his game will come back. His explanatory style for failure in these two sports reflects opti- mism and hope. It is not uncommon to hear him say things like "I just had an off day . . . wait till I get you guys back on the court tomorrow." On the other hand, his game of golf is just atrocious. As he struggles through 18 holes of golf, you can see him giving up. Negative self-talk predominates his explanatory style ("I suck at this game . . . what am I doing out here anyway?'). He rarely plays golf anymore. However, his feelings of learned helplessness are only specific to golf, whereas for other sports, there is sense of a mastery. For some students, we see this differentia- tion of learned helpless feelings across different academic subjects in school. Some students, for instance, find mathematics impossible to comprehend and adopt a helpless explanatory style ("I am brain dead when it comes to math . . . I just don't get it.") However, they may look forward to the challenge of reading and writing a composition ("I love to really get into a good book. I always was a good reader.")

Likewise, physical education and sport have become excellent mediums in which to develop explanatory styles and controllability, much more than classroom situ- ations. Hellison (1995) believes that because of the highly interactive and emo- tional character of "life in the gym," goal setting through opportunities for choice are readily available. This effectively instills self-direction and control.

Pervasive/Permanent Explanato~y Style. Unfortunately, many individuals acquire explanatory styles that are both pervasive and permanent. Hopelessness, mental illness, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, and other self-destructive behav- iors become by-products of chronic learned helplessness. For many students, learned helplessness can begin in a specific context such as physical activity. Within this context, feelings of learned helplessness can transcend from one activity to several (Fincham, Hokoda, & Sanders, 1989; Martinek & Griffith, 1994; Reynolds &Miller, 1989; Walling & Martinek, 1995). This was depicted in a recent study of mastery oriented and learned helpless students in elementary and middle school physical education classes. Attributions for success and failure (explanatory styles) were obtained by asking students to explain why they did or did not do well on numer- ous learning tasks. The tasks were videotaped episodes of the students' actual per- formance during physical education instruction. Task persistence was also mea- sured by recording the time kids spent on easy and difficult tasks. Although there was no difference in task persistence between the two age groups, learned helpless explanatory styles were especially prevalent in the middle school students. The implications of this finding were that similar styles could also be present in other achievement situations-reading, math, writing, and so forth (Martinek & Grigith, 1994).

To test this hypothesis, Walling and Martinek (1995) used a case-study ap- proach to describe the pervasiveness and permanence of a learned helpless middle school student. The student was initially described by her PE teacher as learned helpless, and scores from the Individual Achievement Responsibility Scale (Crandall, Katkvosky, & Crandall, 1968) confirmed this designation. Through for- mal and informal class observation and interviews an explanatory profile was de- veloped. Her explanatory style showed that her learned helplessness extended be- yond the boundaries of the gym. It prevailed in other situations such as science class, and in family and peer relationships. Indifference, self-isolation, and self- doubt were the student's responses to a somewhat desperate situation.

Abating Learned Helplessness: Guideposts for Action

Understanding the sources of learned helplessness can have important im- plications for working with students. Though some of the conditions that affect learned helplessness cannot be changed (i.e., poverty, dysfunctional families, abuse, poor living conditions), there are ways in which students can learn to negotiate these conditions. To date, there is little information about the viability of interven- tion techniques used to abate the conditions of learned helplessness. Regardless of how pervasive a learned helpless orientation may be, the next step is to develop and test ways in which this maladaptive achievement orientation can be altered. Much of the past research has pointed to various forms of cognitive therapy, such as attributional retraining and goal setting. Informed application of these strategies can be especially helpful in developing the resiliency of kids to overcome condi- tions that cause them to become learned helpless. For students predisposed with helplessness (or low resiliency), controllability needs to be taught. Getting students

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to try hard in the face of challenge and to develop effective problem-solving skills will be a must. For example, forms of attributional retraining can get learned help- less students to understand that they can succeed through personal effort (Marfinek & Griffith, 1993). To do this effectively, teachers should get students not to at- tribute failure to inability or lack of effort, but to a lack of a strategy to accomplish the task. Simply telling the student to try hard is not going to do it. Teachers must be explicit in explaining and modeling the effective use of strategies.

Effective goal-setting strategies are also an effective means for helping stu- dents. Breaking larger goals into smaller-ones can help the learned helpless stu- dent redefine success. New criteria can be established by looking at short-term, individual goals, in which students are encouraged to problem solve. This helps the student to develop what Nicholls (1984) called a task goal orientation toward learning. This shifts learned helpless students away from having an ego goal ori- entation in which they place attention on themselves and how they are evaluated by others. Recent research has shown that the development of problem-solving skills will be commensurate with the teaching of "strategic know-how" via physi- cal activity (Martinek & Williams, 1995; Turner & Martinek, 1995). Knowing "another way" or being able to understand the components of proper skill execu- tion enables the learned helpless student to self-regulate and increase what Ames calls (1992) skill tolerance. Focusing on problem-solving skills is also an attitude that teachers need to develop. For example, teachers who are able to tie the task to the student's personal interests and who communicate personal liking for the task will be able to instill an interest in mastery and task involvement (Thomas, 1989).

On the other hand, setting standards and rewards that only a few can attain will cause students to attend to win-loss goals in which social comparisons will predominate. This will quickly defuse a student's willingness to pursue alterna- tives for achieving success. Gymnasiums that are competitively organized will more than likely cause learned helpless students to fixate on ability attributions. This becomes a no-win situation for the student. In contrast, less competitive envi- ronments that use student input (i.e., contract learning, self assessment, coopera- tive learning, student choices) will allow students to set personal goals. In all like- lihood, this will deflect ego goal setting toward task mastery. This will put learned helpless students in a position to take responsibility for their learning and to even- tually make good choices about their future.

In sum, it is important to note that the success of any strategy is contingent on gaining a clear understanding of the learned helpless phenomenon and its cave- ats. The extent to which we understand the nature of learned helplessness and its manifestations will depend on continued research and application. It is my hope that the model presented in this paper will provide a framework from which future research on learned helplessness can be conceptualized and guided. This will gen- erate information to make teachers informed practitioners and, like the goddess Pandora, insure the possibility of hope for their students.

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