Abstract
A study in progress aims to assess whether academic performance and attrition of first year university students may be due to the attributional styles of optimism and pessimism as described by Seligman (1991). Contrary to the expectations suggested by Seligman's research, a preliminary pilot study involving a sample of 38 undergraduate students failed to indicate any positive relationships between optimistic explanatory styles and student performance. Indeed, there was some evidence to suggest that poor performance might in fact be associated with overly optimistic attributions based on past successes. For some students, it appeared that adopting a belief that previous determinants of success will always be present might be overly optimistic and unrealistic, given that they failed to perform adequately in the first year course on which the present study was based. Future research will aim to validate these results by replicating the methodology employed in the present study using much larger sample frames. Since Seligman argues that attributional styles can be learned, the fiscal and developmental implications of the present study would be considerable.