Learning tends to be associated with specific ways of considering events and establishes a student's "explanatory style," or the components of permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

Permanence refers to someone believing that negative events and/or their causes are permanent, despite the fact that evidence, logic, and past experience indicate that they are instead temporary: "I'll never be good in English." Pervasiveness is generalizing, so a negative aspect of a situation is thought to extend to others as well: "I failed math, so I'll fail all my courses." Personalization deals with whether individuals attribute negative events to personal flaws or to outside circumstances or people. They tend to blame themselves for everything: "It's always my fault."

To overcome such helplessness, teachers have to incorporate means of gaining self-worth and learned optimism with activities identifying negative interpretations of events, assessing their accuracy and generating more accurate interpretations. The encouragement of gaining mastery over...
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