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Continues the authors'(see record 1979-13073-001) study of learned helplessness. Previous findings indicate that helpless children attributed their failure to lack of ability and viewed them as insurmountable. Mastery-oriented children, in contrast, tended to emphasize motivational factors and to view failure as surmountable. Although the performance of the 2 groups was usually identical during success or prior to failure, research suggested that these groups may well differ in the degree to which they perceived that their successes are replicable and their failures are avoidable. In the present study, 56 male and 56 female 4th–6th graders performed a task on which they encountered success and then failure. 56 Ss were asked a series of questions about their performance after success and 56 after failure. Compared to mastery-oriented Ss, helpless Ss underestimated the number of successes (and overestimated the …