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Attributions for and consequences of student misbehaviorDonetta J. Cothran a; Pamela Hodges Kulinna b; Deborah A. Garrahy c

a Indiana University, USA b Arizona State University, USA c Illinois State University, USA

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2009

To cite this Article Cothran, Donetta J., Kulinna, Pamela Hodges and Garrahy, Deborah A.(2009)'Attributions for and consequences ofstudent misbehavior',Physical Education & Sport Pedagogy,14:2,155 — 167

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17408980701712148

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Attributions for and consequences of student misbehavior

Donetta J. Cothrana�, Pamela Hodges Kulinnab and Deborah A. Garrahyc

aIndiana University, USA; bArizona State University, USA; cIllinois State University, USA

Background: Effective classroom management is a critical teaching skill and a keyconcern of educators. As such it has been the focus of much research and as a resulteducators know a good deal about what happens in physical education class and theactions teachers take to deal with student behavior. Surprisingly, however, we do notknow much at all about what teachers believe causes student misbehavior, nor whatstudents say about the same issue. This seems like a critical oversight as how oneexplains another’s behavior determines the individual’s reactions to that behavior.Purpose: To examine teacher and student attributions for behavior in physical educationclass.Participants and setting: Twenty-three secondary physical education teachers (14 malesand nine females), and 182 secondary students (100 males and 82 females) from avariety of school districts in the United States.Research design: A descriptive study aimed at examining teacher and studentattributions. Maximum variation sampling of schools, teachers, and students wasemployed to explore the role of context on attribution.Data collection: Teachers were interviewed at a convenient time during the school daywhile students were interviewed alone or in groups of two or three students during theirphysical education class. An interview guide structured all discussions. Interviews wererecorded and later transcribed.Data analysis: The interview data were analyzed via analytic induction methods toidentify and extract common themes. Trustworthiness measures included researchertriangulation and a search for negative cases.Findings: Although the sites and participants in this study were selected for theirdiversity, comparisons of teachers and students across sites revealed perspectives thatwere remarkably similar. One key difference between groups was that of attributionfor student misbehavior. Teachers most often attributed student misbehavior tounknown or home factors while students were more likely to attribute misbehavior toneed for attention and/or a lack of meaningful class content. Both groups largelyagreed that student misbehavior negatively affected class time, content, and attitude.Some students cited potential positive outcomes from misbehavior of increased funand social status.Conclusions: Although teachers and students shared fairly similar perspectives, theydisagreed on the reasons for misbehavior and this is a critical difference inperspective that suggests neither group is able and/or willing to ‘own’ the problem ofstudent misbehavior and until it is owned, it will not be solved. There is a need formore reflection by teachers and students to acknowledge their mutual contributions tostudent misbehavior. Only when both groups start to take ownership of theircontribution to the problem of misbehavior can the problem be solved. For teachers,reflection and ownership needs to include taking a broader view of management inorder to see the interaction of curriculum and instruction with class management.

Keywords: class management; teacher and student beliefs

Physical Education and Sport PedagogyVol. 14, No. 2, April 2009, pp. 155–167

�Corresponding author. Email: dcothran@indiana.edu

ISSN 1740-8989 print/ISSN 1742-5786 online

# 2009 Association for Physical EducationDOI: 10.1080/17408980701712148http://www.informaworld.com

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Effective classroom management is a critical teaching skill and a key concern of educators(Lewis 1999; McCormack 1997). As such, it has been the focus of a great deal of researchin this area. For example, researchers have compared the behaviors of effective versus inef-fective teachers (Fink and Siedentop 1989) or examined problems and strategies of a widerange of teachers (McCormack 1997). We know what types of misbehaviors occur in phys-ical education (Kulinna, Cothran, and Regulous 2006) and how teachers say they learnedabout management (Garrahy, Cothran, and Kulinna 2005). Other avenues of investigationinvolve quantifying types of teacher behaviors (Henkel 1991) or teachers’ reactions to stu-dents’ misbehaviors (Fernandez-Balboa 1991; Goyette, Dore, and Dion 2000).

The end result of these and the many other management investigations is that we know agood deal about what happens in physical education class and the actions teachers take todeal with student behavior. Surprisingly though, we do not know much at all about whatteachers’ believe causes student misbehavior, nor what students say about the sameissue. This seems like a critical oversight as how one explains another’s behavior deter-mines the individual’s reactions to that behavior.

Attribution theory supplies a general framework that emphasizes the importance ofunderstanding this type of decision-making process. Attributions can be thought of asbeliefs used to explain events. Kelsey et al. (2004) summarize the three assumptions thatunderlie attribution theory:

First, people seek to interpret or understand self and others’ behavior in terms of its causes.Second, people assign causes systematically. Third, attributed causes play an important rolein determining reactions to those behaviors. (41)

Perhaps the best known of the attribution theorists with regard to educational settings isWeiner (1985) who posited three causal factors related to attributions for success andfailure: locus of control, stability, and controllability.

Attribution theory has often been investigated with regard to academic success andfailure, particularly with regard to if the teacher or student attributes an academicoutcome to effort or ability. In general, students’ attributions for success and failure are sig-nificant and can vary based on the subject matter (Boekaerts, Otten, and Voeten 2003). Tea-chers also make different attributions for students’ achievement (Tollefson, Melvin, andThippavajjala 1990) and the social class, race, and gender of students may influenceteacher attributions (Tom and Cooper 1986). Culture can be an influence on attributionsas researchers have found that Asians are more likely to perceive effort as an importantfactor in success than do Americans who are more likely to attribute success to ability(Tuss, Zimmer, and Ho 1995).

Soodak and Podell (1994) report that teachers’ attribution beliefs are related to theiractions as teachers’ preferred solutions to problem behaviors varied with the attributionfor the behavior (e.g. if teachers believed that the behavior was related to home issues,they believed that parental involvement in the intervention was more appropriate than ifthey believed the attribution was school related). A key and related aspect of this researchis the finding that teachers’ emotional reactions to students’ performance affects students’perceptions. For example, Graham (1984) manipulated a learning setting so that studentshad a teacher who expressed mild anger or pity to students who had failed a task. If thechild was in the mild anger setting, that child was more likely to attribute their failure tolack of effort. In contrast, failing students who received pity were more likely to believethat their failure was related to a lack of ability. Similar findings using a different

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methodology also found that teachers respond with more anger to low achievement that isbelieved to be due to lack of effort and more pity when they believe that the student has lowability (Georgiou et al. 2002).

Despite its influence on helping educators understand how teachers’ and students’ attri-butions are related to academic performance and emotions, the framework has beensparingly applied to understanding non-academic student behavior. Some work, however,has been completed in general education. Greek elementary teachers attribute pupil misbeha-vior to pupil and family factors far more so than they did school factors (Mavropoulou andPadeliadu 2002; Poulou and Norwich 2000). Atici andMerry (2001) report similar findings inelementary classrooms in England and Turkey while Ho (2004) also found Chinese andAustralian teachers to attribute more misbehaviors to student and family factors than toteacher factors. Teacher attribution for behavioral problems is also related to teachers’ referraldecisions for special services for the child (Hughes et al. 1993).

The consistency of these general education findings suggest that similar attribution pro-cesses may be at work in physical education, but little work has been done in this area. Oneof the few exceptions is Ennis’ (1995) examination of teachers’ responses to noncompliantstudents in which she found that teachers blamed student noncompliance on low studentmotivation, a ‘condition’ that teachers sometimes viewed as the result of a dysfunctionalhome life. It was the purpose of this investigation to examine teacher and student attribu-tions for behavior in physical education class. This report is part of a larger investigationfocused on student behavior and class management. The larger study involved bothsurvey (Kulinna, Cothran, and Regualos 2003) and interview (Cothran, Kulinna, andGarrahy 2003) data from teachers and students.

Method

Participants and setting

This investigation occurred in the United States. Twenty-three secondary (grades 6–12) phys-ical education teachers, 14 males and 9 females, volunteered to share their perspectives onclass management. Teachers identified their ethnicity as Caucasian (14), African-American(8) and Hispanic (1). Their experience levels varied widely with seven teachers having lessthan 10 years of experience, two teachers had 11–20 years experience, and 11 teachersreported having over 21 years of experience. Three teachers did not report their years of teach-ing experience.

Also volunteering to discuss their views on the same topic were 182 secondary physicaleducation students, 100 males and 82 females. Every attempt was made to recruit a widevariety of students with respect to grade level, gender, ethnicity, participation level, andbehavioral compliance. Of the 182 students, there were 23 sixth graders, 35 seventhgraders, 29 eighth graders, 58 ninth graders, 14 tenth graders, seven eleventh graders, 14twelfth graders and two students of unknown high school grade. They ranged in agefrom 11 to 18 years old. Just over half the sample (53%) were African-American studentswith the remainder of the participants representing Caucasian (30%), Hispanic (12%) orMulti-racial/Other (5%) heritages. Approval for this study was granted at the universityInstitutional Review Board, school district, and school level and all organizations’ guide-lines were followed to gain informed consent from teachers, parents, and students.Pseudonyms are used throughout the paper to protect the privacy of the individuals whovolunteered to participate.

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Schools

The schools were selected to represent as wide a range of contexts and student populationsas possible, with a special concern for including typically under-represented ethnic minoritygroups. Patton (2002) describes this approach as ‘maximum variation sampling’ and it ‘. . .aims at capturing and describing central themes that cut across a great deal of variation’(Patton 2002, 234). The student participants were drawn from eight high schools andfive middle schools. Eight of the schools were from a large, inner city school districtand, with the exception of one school, each served over 800 students. The one exceptionwas The Academy, a magnet high school, whose enrollment was approximately 400 stu-dents. These schools’ student bodies were predominantly African American with the excep-tion of one middle school that served a primarily Hispanic population in a bilingualacademic setting. Another urban, but not inner city, high school from a different districtserved a primarily Caucasian student body of over 1700 students. Two additional highschools of over 1600 students each were located in the suburbs. Each was located in adifferent school district and enrollment was primarily Caucasian as was the enrollmentof a middle school in another district with a suburban/rural enrollment mix. The finalhigh school was located in a rural environment in yet another district and served 350 Cau-casian students.

The socioeconomic range of the schools was also broad. Eight of the schools could beclassified as lower socioeconomic neighborhoods while the remaining five schools rep-resented lower middle to upper middle class communities. School facilities reflectedthese socioeconomic differences with some schools having excellent resources and facili-ties while other schools had comparatively minimal support and space.

Each of the schools offered a multi-activity physical education curriculum with a primaryemphasis on team sports. As would be expected with this many sites, the specifics of theimplementation varied from school to school. Some of the programs were largely recreationalin nature while others offered very structured units with accompanying instruction andassessment.

Data collection and analysis

All participants were aware of the broad purpose of the study which was to examine studentbehavior and class management. They also knew that a wide variety of teachers and stu-dents were completing surveys and interviews at a number of different schools. Teacherswere interviewed during planning or lunch periods by a member of the research team.An interview guide (Patton 2002) structured the conversations which lasted from 30 to75 minutes. Topics of focus included personal teaching history and philosophy, studentbehavior and relationships, and management knowledge and strategies.

Students volunteered to be interviewed alone or in groups of two or three friends duringtheir regular physical education class. With the exception of a few students, most studentschose to be interviewed with a friend. Research team members used an interview guide tostructure the conversations which lasted from 10 to 30 minutes. Students were asked todiscuss student behavior, effectiveness of various management strategies, and teacher–student relationships. All conversations were recorded and later transcribed. The tran-scribed interviews were returned to the teachers for a member check on the data. Studenttranscripts were not returned to students because by the time transcription was complete,students were out of school for summer break. The interview data were analyzed via

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analytic induction methods to identify and extract common themes (LeCompte and Preissle1993). The data analysis process began with each of the three primary investigatorsworking alone to review the interview data, what LeCompte and Preissle have called ‘scan-ning’. Notes were taken, initial ideas and questions recorded, and eventually each devel-oped a personal, initial coding system. This first attempt to make sense of the large dataresources was largely descriptive in nature and was an attempt to identify ‘things thathappen frequently with groups of people’ (LeCompte and Preissle 1993, 237). Forexample, student answers to why students misbehave were initially grouped togetherunder descriptive titles like ‘look cool’ or ‘teacher attention’. Teacher and student datawere kept separate throughout these first stages.

Those individual descriptive systems were then shared with the other investigators.The initial topics were discussed, reviewed, and compared to the data. Data topicsspecific to individual or smaller groups of schools were eliminated and the discussionsand data review focused on more common descriptors that cut across all settings forteachers or students. In this stage of the analysis, the investigators were searching for‘broad outlines of the phenomenon studied’ (LeCompte and Preissle 1993, 237).Detailed and lengthy conversations among the investigators with constant reviews ofthe transcripts provided the impetus for several iterations of collapsing and consolidat-ing the data into more meaningful chunks. For example, the initial categories of ‘lookcool’, and ‘teacher attention’ were consolidated into a larger category of ‘attentionseeking’ that encompassed the smaller, descriptive initial groupings. The themeswithin teacher and student data were then compared for similarities and differences.Finally, the investigators searched the data categories for relationships and linkagesto related educational theory. This iterative process resulted in the final themes pre-sented in this paper.

During and after final theme development, the data were reviewed for negative cases thatmight prompt reconsideration of the developed themes. This negative case review did ident-ify topics on which groups disagreed and those instances are described in the Resultssection. In addition to a search for negative cases, triangulation was used to increase thetrustworthiness of the data collected. Denzin (1978) notes there are different types of tri-angulation including data, investigator, theory, and methodology. The overall design ofthe larger research project, of which these data are a part, utilized data, investigator, andmethodological triangulation. The data that form the basis of this report rely primarilyon investigator triangulation in which different investigators worked independently andthen together to examine the data. Although the data source, interviews, was the same,the use of such varied sites and the inclusion of both teachers and students was, in asense, data triangulation as multiple contexts and perspectives could be examined and com-pared. Limited, informal class observation did also allow for minimal traditional data tri-angulation of this data set.

Results

Although the sites and participants in this study were selected for their diversity, compari-sons of teachers and students across sites revealed perspectives that were remarkablysimilar within and between groups. The one key difference between groups was that of attri-bution for student misbehavior. Both groups generally agreed on the consequences of thosemisbehaviors.

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What causes misbehavior?

Nobody knows

When teachers were asked why students misbehave, many gave a version of ‘Who knows?’for their response as Mr Warren explained:

Why do they misbehave? That’s the thing I ask myself. Why in the world would they evenwanna do some of the stuff they do? They know they’re gonna get in trouble and nothinggood is gonna come of it and you ask them and they go ‘I don’t know’. I have no idea either.

Mr Stephens seemed similarly perplexed when asked why his students misbehaved:

I have no idea. It could be one of 100 different things. It could be something happened at home.It could be that they didn’t have any breakfast. It could be that you know, grandmother died. Itcould be the boyfriend broke up with them or somebody looked at them the wrong way. There’sa 100 different things why kids react the way they do.

It starts at home

When teachers did supply a specific reason for student behavior, they most commonly citedstudents’ poor home lives as the problem. Ms Mills suggested:

The ones that are the worst just don’t care. I think their home life, well, they’re kind of on theirown, raising themselves and their parents aren’t home to teach them respect and I think a lot ofit stems from the home life and the troubled situations they have at home.

Mr Nichols shared similar views, ‘A lot of them are raising themselves and lot of their man-nerisms are because they’re raising themselves. Just the way they speak to each other isharsher because they’ve never been taught to be kind’. Ms Simmons elaborated on whatshe believed was wrong with many of her students’ home life:

I think it starts way back a long time ago. It starts at home. Unfortunately you have childrenwho are coming from a single parent home, you have a child coming from a home in whichthey are being raised by grandparents. I am not saying that it’s the grandparents fault, butlet’s get real. They are grandparents and they already raised their children. Children now-a-days are just more difficult to manage and as a result there is less discipline because somany parents, they just throw their hands up into the air. I can’t do anything with them sothey send them to school. Parents come into the school for a disciplinary conference andthey will say you do something with them I can’t do anything with them at home. Youshould have started doing something with them a long time ago. It’s the way I feel about itbecause the student all the sudden doesn’t become unruly overnight.

Students rarely talked about home life as contributing to student misbehavior and when itwas mentioned it was almost always in response to the question, ‘Is it a good idea for tea-chers to call home if a student misbehaves?’ Students’ recommendations on the effective-ness of that technique were mixed and when answering a few students did comment on therole that parenting played in behavior, a point that Natasha noted, ‘Some parents are reallystrict and they’ll really get on you. It depends on the parents a lot of times. I mean some-times the kids are the way they are because of their parents’. Overall though, home lifeplayed a minimal role in student attributions for misbehavior.

Look at me

Rather than home life, students were far more likely to attribute misbehavior to attentionseeking. Felice explained, ‘They want the attention, kind of a look at me type thing’.

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Jamal claimed that the attention that came with misbehavior could lead to increasedsocial status:

They wanna get popularity. Like you know most of the time if you act up and get the teacherupset then you get, I guess it’s like a source of gaining power in the class by being the classclown, being the center of attention.

That popularity could also lead to increased status for the male students from the oppositesex as Camilla explained, ‘I think the reason the guys get in trouble so much is to impressthe girls’. Carl agreed, ‘They behave bad just to get attention. They want to be cool so thegirls will like them’. No student specifically addressed female students misbehaving to gainsocial status.

A few students noted that misbehavior was sometimes used to get attention from theteacher. Alicia described those students, ‘Some of them do it [misbehave] to get attention.I think they do it to get the teacher’s attention just so he won’t forget about them’. This needfor relationship and acknowledgement, or respect, from the teacher played a key role in howstudents interpreted the management skills of their teachers. A companion paper (Cothran,Kulinna, and Garrahy 2003) to this report details the importance of positive relationshipsbased on mutual caring and respect on student and teacher behavior.

Some teachers also believed that students misbehaved to get attention and that attentionseeking was linked to poor home lives. Mr Richards talked about his misbehaving students,‘A lot of them need attention. Evidently they don’t get it at home’. Ms Stringer agreed,‘There are some of them who just want the attention. I don’t know if they’re not gettingit at home or what’. Ms Marshall reported similar needs in her students:

I think a lot of kids they still act up because they’re attention starved and if you yell at themyou’re paying attention to them. Some kids want you to just take them and grab them andthat’s a touch. You still do, I go up to a kid and give them a big hug, grab them around theneck. They look at me! You know, but they still want you to touch them. You just have tobe careful how you do it.

When it’s boring

From the students’ perspectives, the meaningfulness of the subject matter and class activitieswas also a key influence on student behavior. Tim explained, ‘When it’s boring, we’re morelikely to be bad’, or as Roberto said, ‘Kids act up ‘cause they’re real bored of it’.Misbehaviorinterrupted the ‘boring’ class for which students held little value and provided for ‘fun’, ofwhich students held great value. Antoine described it as, ‘They don’t care about a subject thatmeans nothing to them. They’d rather have fun, like more fun than learning something theyreally don’t care about’.

When the subject matter was of interest to students, however, behavioral compliance wasmore likely to occur. Juliana claimed, ‘If they like it [the curricular unit] they ain’t gonna beas bad. If they don’t like it they gonna be disruptive’. James discussed the basketball unit,the most popular activity at his school, ‘Most of them, they like playing basketball a lot. Sothey stay on task and they agree to start playing. When they don’t like it they don’t getdressed or they just stand on the wall and cause trouble’.

When questioned about the causes of student misbehavior, the teachers never directlyattributed student misbehavior to curricular offerings. Yet when asked to describe studentbehaviors in a variety of units, they were all able to describe differences. Mr Jacksonexplained what happens when students liked a unit, ‘I think there are some units that aremore appealing to the students. That of course makes my job a little easier because

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they’re in tune with and they’re excited’. Mr Rodriguez described what units had thehighest levels of student compliance at his school:

If they could do basketball every day they would behave. I would say volleyball is one of theones that they don’t like but they get engaged and actually become competitive and then theylove it, at least some classes. My particular school [bilingual school that served a primarily His-panic population], they all love soccer. It’s like soccer’s imbedded in them some how.

Consequences on time, content, and attitude

As many students noted, student misbehavior sometimes served a ‘positive’ role in advan-cing the students’ agenda for fun and social status. Students and teachers were alsocognizant of the negative consequences of student misbehavior on time, class content,and attitude.

Time

There was less time for teaching and learning available as teachers used so much of theirclass time and energy on management. Ms Patrick estimated how much time she spenton management in each class,

At least 30% of the time and if you don’t spend at least that, you spend 90%. You spend all dayyelling and screaming. You spend so much time with the discipline you’re not able to do all theother kinds of things that make it fun.

Mr Daniels explained how much time could be taken up with management:

In some cases, teachers might spend 40 minutes of a 55 minute hour disciplining somebody. It’snot just one kid, but you get one kid settled down and somebody is up over here and by the timeyou get them settled down it’s over there again.

The administrative procedures of student discipline were also time intensive as Mr Marshalldescribed:

One thing that is different about teaching today is that there is so much more paperwork. Youhave to document everything . . . paper trail you know. Look at here, we have tons of referrals.We have LOR’s [letter of referral]. They have forms we send out to the kids when they’ve donesomething wrong the 3rd time. We have discipline forms, we have an accident form, paperworkfor everything. So to make a phone call or letter home you fill it out like the LOR.

Students also recognized that misbehavior took teacher time and interfered with studentlearning. Kelly described what happens when students misbehave:

The same students get written up and it takes time out of their teaching and then you know weget affected by that and then we don’t have that much time to work on what we have to work oncause she took the time out to write somebody up.

Changed content

A second negative consequence of student misbehavior was the narrow and reduced curri-cular offerings that resulted when teachers removed the units they found problematic from amanagement perspective. Some units had been dropped completely as Ms Waltondescribed:

We don’t do gymnastics, archery and wrestling. Those are the three we’ve gotten away from.With wrestling it’s the harassment issue. You have to separate and a handful of girls would do

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it, but most wouldn’t. With gymnastics it’s all the equipment and the safety and getting the kidsto listen.

Dance was also frequently mentioned as a unit that had become too problematic to teach.The end result was a curriculum dominated by team sports that students, or at least the vocalstudents, preferred.

Teachers also reported being able to cover less material due to the increased time thatmanagement demands took from the class period. Ms Manning described how her teachinghad changed:

The first five years of teaching the difference is I could do so much more. It was possible to runa whole tournament of volleyball games or have four relay teams out of each class and run awhole track meet or make up four or five water ballet numbers and put on a show. You can’thardly get there. You can’t get there anymore because we spend so much time with being rigidand that takes time. It takes so much time.

As might be expected due to their relatively short tenure at their schools, no student com-ments were noted that related to a historical perspective on narrower curricular offerings. Afew students, however, were consciously aware of their ability to influence the pace of workwithin the curriculum. Rebecca noted, ‘If you act up she gonna sit there and talk to youabout it. But we act up on purpose because she’ll talk about what we did for the wholehour so we don’t have to do no work’. Jamal explained how his class responded to differentunits:

Like alright when we play volleyball everybody be all geeked. They be like ‘Yeah! Let’s goman’. When he be like ‘Let’s go outside and jog’ and we be ‘Awwwww man!’ They be strag-gling around. They stop the jog and walk when they get around where you can’t see past thecars. And when they get like he standing right there and when they get on that one strip theystart jogging again. They don’t really participate. When it’s volleyball it’s something fun andeverybody be all in it but when it’s jogging they really don’t even be trying. They just be likeforget it and when he ain’t looking they stop jogging.

Sharice described other delaying tactics, ‘When they hate it they’ll ask questions and tellyou they don’t feel good’.

Attitude

Both groups also acknowledged the negative effect that student misbehavior had on teacherattitude and energy. Ms Stringer described her daily struggles, ‘The apathy just gets youdown, the lack of motivation and ambition. I mean there’s just so much negative and notcaring and not wanting to do anything and a lack of respect. It’s tough to keep trying’.Ms Patrick, a veteran teacher, talked about the changes in her career:

Teaching was a great joy and I was so happy to be a gym teacher, that’s what I wanted to do.The fun has really gone out of it because it’s so hard now, simply because the children have nodiscipline, structure and stability in their own lives. It’s not their fault, but the result has been alot of joy is gone out. It’s a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. You can’t do the stuff youwent to school to do.

Some students were aware of the negative affect on teachers’ attitudes. Telesa describedher teacher’s lack of patience with the class:

I think that’s just because they’re frustrated with the kids who don’t wanna learn. And the onesthat wanna learn, she wanna help them, but she can’t help the ones that don’t wanna learn,

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because the ones that don’t wanna learn don’t pay attention and be quiet so teachers sometimesbe frustrated.

Ultimately that frustration was a negative factor in teacher–student relationships. Mariashared,

Like sometimes the teacher will be frustrated or whatever with what they have to do and I think,well, you know, I think it gets to them and they get mad. I think they should know not to yell atus all the time and to talk to us with respect.

Alison reported similar negative consequences at her school, ‘The people misbehavingdon’t really bother me, but it does bother the teacher and the student leaders [seniorswho served as teacher aides in class] and then they get mad and treat us bad so in a wayit does affect everybody’.

Misbehavior also sometimes frustrated other students. Lauren explained, ‘And like whenpeople don’t listen and then everything just gets repeated over and over and its like listenpeople. You just wanna pound your head to the ground saying I already heard this fivetimes’. Or as Donnell put it, ‘They [misbehaving students] get in the way of the onestrying. It’s just another obstacle to deal with them’.

Problem ownership

Given the diversity of school settings and the inclusion of both teachers’ and students’ per-spectives on the same issue, the findings related to attributions for student misbehavior areamazingly similar. In general, both groups agreed on the negative consequences (decreasedclass time, changed content, and attitude) of student misbehavior, although students alsonoted the potential positive outcomes of increased fun and social status in a schoolsystem in which many students found few other reasons to engage in and enjoy theirschool day. Teachers and students, however, disagreed on the reasons for misbehaviorand this is a critical difference in perspective that suggests neither group is able and/orwilling to ‘own’ the problem of student misbehavior and until it is owned, it will not besolved. This problem ownership suggests multiple factors may be at work, all of whichneed additional exploration and understanding.

A key topic for future investigation is why both participants attributed student misbeha-vior to factors external to themselves. It is plausible that all those factors were occurring andit was simply one’s world view and perspective on the behavior that caused them to identifydifferent key factors. For example, a student engaged in a dysfunctional family structuremay not see that family structure as problematic as it is the only one that child has everknown. Consequently, they attribute their misbehavior to other causes most salient totheir setting, social pressures and daily lessons. Meanwhile, the teacher with the advantagesof age and knowing many family structures can see the impact of a child’s family on thechild from their experienced, outsider perspective. Similarly, the teacher may havetrouble seeing their curriculum and lessons as problematic because those lessons mayhave worked in the past or would work on a class with students that acted like theteacher did when they were younger.

Alternately, it may be that the teachers and students both showed self-serving bias inattribution. This theory suggests that individuals will make attributions that give themselvescredit for positive outcomes while rejecting responsibility for negative outcomes in order tomaximize self or public image (Bradley 1978). In this case, both groups most often

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attributed student misbehavior to factors outside their control such as home life for the tea-chers and lesson content for the students. This self-serving bias is important because if onefeels that they are not responsible then there is little reason to attempt to change behaviors.

Another possible explanation is provided by Mavropoulou and Padeliadu (2002) whosuggest the larger context of the schools may influence teacher attributions. They explainthat teachers may feel they have low control in the sociopolitical context of their schooland that lack of control spills over into their beliefs about how much control they canhave over student behavior. It seems likely that students may have the same perceptionof lack of control over behavior as they have even less influence than teachers in the socio-political context of schools. Cothran and Ennis (1997) lend support to this possibility asthey describe teachers’ and students’ perceptions of lack of power and how that influencedtheir behavior in physical education classes.

It is clear that these and other factors are at work with regard to attribution, but regardlessof the explanation(s) for misbehavior, there is a need for more reflection by teachers andstudents to acknowledge their mutual contributions to student misbehavior. Only whenboth groups start to take ownership of their contribution to the problem of misbehaviorcan the problem be solved. For teachers, reflection and ownership needs to includetaking a broader view of management in order to see the interaction of curriculum andinstruction with class management. Traditional discussions of management and effectiveteaching often focus on general principles like ‘withitness’ (Kounin 1977), with theunstated assumption that if teachers can master these principles then effective managementand student compliance should occur. Although ‘generic’ management skills like withitnessor consistent and clear expectations are important, it seems that effective management cannot be discussed separately from effective curriculum and instruction practices. As Doyle(1979) and more recent researchers (e.g. Hastie 1997) have noted, a class is an ecologicalsystem in which the managerial and instructional task systems are mutually influenced.With specific regard to management in physical education, Supaporn (2000) and her col-leagues (Supaporn, Dodds, and Griffin 2003) found a link between disruptive student beha-vior and class content within a weak instructional and managerial task.

With regard to student reflection, curricular models like Hellison’s Social Responsibility(Hellison 1985) may serve as a valuable starting point for teaching students about personalresponsibility. Teachers will likely need additional training, however, to use recommendedteaching strategies like student sharing and reflection time. Journaling and student contractsmay also help clarify expectations and responsibilities of students in class with regard tobehavior.

Other avenues of future research include examining attributions with elementary teachersand students, as well as cross-cultural explorations. In addition, a closer examination of therelationship of attribution to efficacy is warranted as Hughes et al. (1993) found that teacherefficacy influenced at least some of their decision making about problem students. Theseresults provide a useful first step and launching point for more detailed examinations ofthe critical relationship between teacher and student attributions and their respective beha-viors in physical education.

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