It's not my fault: understanding nursing students' causal attributions in Pathophysiology

Pathophysiology is a difficult subject matter for many nursing students. This course is also critical for safe clinical practice. However, little research has explored what variables may influence nursing students' success in this course. This study is the first in a forthcoming series that seeks to better understand how to facilitate student success in Pathophysiology. In this study, students' causal attributions for successes and failures were explored as these attributions greatly influence future academic motivation and behavior. Students were asked to respond to two open-ended questions in order to better understand what causal attributions students were making for their successes and failures in Pathophysiology. Seventy-five Bachelor of Science in Nursing students who were enrolled in Pathophysiology returned their responses (92.6% response rate). Content analysis was utilized to determine whether students were making internal or external causal attributions for their successes and failures. Additionally, responses were evaluated in order to identify common themes shared by respondents. The majority of respondents (84%) attributed their academic successes in Pathophysiology in part to internal causes, and the majority of respondents (68%) attributed their academic failures, in part, to external causes. In this study the majority of students attributed their successes to controllable, unstable causes-primarily effort. Research indicates that attributing success to effort may reflect that students' confidence in their abilities is suffering, and that attributing failures to external causes, such as task difficulty, are also detrimental to performance and learning (Siegle et al., 2009). The results of this study are further presented and discussed.