“…More specifically, approximately half of the teachers in Tollefson et al’s (1990) study attributed student failure to student effort, with a significant proportion of attributions also involving external family variables (30%) and other internal student characteristics (77%; e.g., previous experiences, emotional maturity, interest, attention), However, only 2% of teachers in this study attributed student failure to teacher characteristics, and no attributions were reported to task difficulty. Results from Jager and Denessen (2015) similarly showed teachers to primarily explain students’ failure as due to internal student factors (e.g., attention, motivation, effort) than lesson difficulty or instructional quality (least common), reporting greater blame when failure was perceived as internal to and controllable by the student and lower criticism following external and uncontrollable attributions. Although other study findings suggest that teachers’ may focus especially on students’ external and uncontrollable antecedents to explain student performance (e.g., influence of prior teachers, learning experiences, or other students; Bar-Tal and Guttmann, 1981; Rolison and Medway, 1985; Hall et al, 1989; Bertrand and Marsh, 2015), existing findings generally suggest that teachers are more likely to attribute student failure to factors internal to the students themselves.…”