The Label of Low Effort: Exploring Teachers’ Effort-Related Language, Meritocratic Beliefs, and Attribution-Based Responsibility Assignments

Author

• Kelly A. LarsonFollow

Degree Date

8-20-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Education

First Advisor

Dr. Kristeen Chachage

Second Advisor

Dr. Acacia Nikoi

Third Advisor

Dr. Laura Wangsness Willemsen

Abstract

Educators play an integral role in the academic success and future educational trajectory of their students. Yet, in an unjust, hyper-individualistic education system grounded in a meritocratic myth, even the most well-intentioned teachers have a tendency to explain students’ underperformance through a self-protective, deficit-based attribution process that puts the onus of academic achievement almost entirely on students and their families. This recursive cycle is especially damaging for students who do not exhibit effort in normalized, Eurocentric ways. This study examines how teachers’ attributions and responsibility assignments for students’ perceived low-effort behavior are shaped by inequitable meritocratic beliefs and reinforced through system- sanctioned deficit discourse. Using Gee’s critical discourse analysis model, this interview-based study reveals how eight American K-12 educators from an outer-ring Midwestern suburb describe and attribute students’ low effort behavior, protect their identities as moral, competent professionals when faced with this confounding conduct, and justify meritocracy-based views of schooling that allow them to shift responsibility away from themselves. This work further contributes to the current literature by showing how the interdependent relationship between teachers’ ascription process, meritocratic beliefs and values, and deficit discourse leads to a label of low effort that can undermine students’ academic trajectories. With a hopeful stance, recommendations focus on how educators can learn to interrupt this harmful, self-perpetuating cycle, and shift responsibility for student achievement back to what is in the control of the teacher, school leaders, and the larger institution and practices of American schooling.

Keywords: academic effort, causal attribution, educational meritocracy, deficit discourse, figured worlds, critical discourse analysis

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