Students in four university classes in educational psychology were used as the target population to study the effect of two factors, degree of effort exerted studying a subject, and written feedback from the instructor, on the cognitive and affective attitudes these students formed toward the subject and their assignments. The students, unaware that they were subjects in an experiment, received high or low effort assignments and high or no praise comments. Two assignments were given to each student from two different materials to assure counterbalancing of teacher, classroom selection, and time of day effects. The effort by praise (2x2) multivariate analysis of covariance and class by praise (4x2) ANOVAs showed that students who received high praise and completed the high effort assignments formed significantly more positive attitudes than students in the other three groups. (Author/MC)