by Cindy Nebel

Any educator in today’s environment will tell you that all the cognitive strategies in the world are great, but we also need to focus on social-emotional learning (SEL). And today’s blog is about one facet of SEL that has plenty of research to support its necessity in learning: self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as our belief in our ability to successfully complete a given task (1). This means that we can have different levels of self-efficacy for different domains (e.g., math vs. literature) and even within domains (e.g., addition vs. division). As you can imagine, self-efficacy is a good predictor of academic performance, but also of persistence, effort, and course selection.

Now, if you’re like me, you read that last sentence and lifted an eyebrow noting that correlation does not equal causation. People who perform better are of course going to believe they can achieve … because they can. And of course, I’m going to try harder if I believe that effort will pay off. But hang tight, reader, there’s more to uncover here.

You see, self-efficacy can be manipulated. That means that two people of equal ability can have different beliefs about their abilities. If we can change their beliefs, we could potentially increase their effort, persistence, and possibly even performance.

The Study

Today, I’m reviewing a research study that attempted to do just that (2). In this study, the researchers were particularly interested in elementary students who were low performers (lowest 20%) in calculation fluency. The children were then divided into three groups: a control group who received no intervention, a skills group that received extra training on calculation strategies, and a self-efficacy group who received the skills training with additional self-efficacy support. The students in the two intervention groups were at different schools so that the teachers could receive different training and not have to try to differentiate among students.

For the intervention itself, students were taken out of their regular classroom and given 45 minutes of calculation strategy instruction twice per week for 12 weeks in small groups. They also participated in a two short sessions where they played math games and were given a worksheet to complete for homework to practice their new skills.

The self-efficacy intervention was designed to be comprehensive, targeting all the different ways in which self-efficacy is thought to be influenced:

1)      Previous experiences: If you think about times that you have been successful in the past, you are more likely to believe you can be successful in the future. For the intervention, students were provided lots of opportunities to be successful, with tasks that were a little challenging, but that were at the skill level of the students and students were given lots of encouraging feedback to show them their individual progress.

2)      Messages from others: If other people tell you that you can succeed, you are more likely to believe that you can! For the intervention, teachers were asked to praise student efforts and improvements and to have individual conversations with each student to talk about their strategies and how much progress they were making.

3)      Vicarious experiences: If we see other people like us who succeed in a task, we feel like we can do it too. For the intervention, students were encouraged to notice when their peers were successful and to share that with the group. Group progress was also highlighted in addition to individual progress.

4)      Emotional/physiological state: If you are cranky or tired, you are less likely to feel confident in your ability to succeed. Arguably, this is the most difficult for a lot of educators to manipulate directly. For the intervention, though, they taught children about how emotions can influence behavior and learning through stories and discussions.

The Results

The researchers measured students’ math self-efficacy before, immediately after, and 5 months after the intervention. Students who received skill training only showed a small increase in self-efficacy, but those in the self-efficacy group showed a big change. When looking at just those who started with low self-efficacy before the intervention, there was a substantial increase in their self-efficacy by the end, with a large effect size.

Then they looked at just what part of the intervention had the biggest impact on those gains. Students reported that previous and vicarious experiences were the biggest factors that led to their increased confidence. That is, seeing their own success and celebrating their friends’ successes gave the biggest boost to their confidence.

But what about performance?

The researchers didn’t report the change in math skills for students in the skills group. Instead, they looked at how math skills changed for students within the self-efficacy condition. The intervention worked better for some students than others. For students who ended the intervention with high self-efficacy, their math skills went up considerably. Students who ended the intervention with about the same low self-efficacy as when they started did not show those same improvements.

Now, we can once again raise an eyebrow and say, “Well, of course! The students who were performing well had high self-efficacy!” But we also know that students in the skills group were not making gains in self-efficacy. Even though they were learning the same skills and presumably making some performance gains, their performance gains didn’t lead to big changes in self-efficacy

Bottom Line

My take away from this study is that a group of struggling students were taught to believe in themselves, in their ability to work hard and succeed. And, for the students where that message sunk in, they did actually have more successes. While there are some limitations to the interpretations we can make for this study, my bottom line for educators would still have to be that creating a culture of self-efficacy is a good thing. Based on this one study, I’m not going to recommend that you complete a full-scale intervention with careful controls, but maybe a stronger focus on building up our students’ confidence and teaching them to build each other up could make for a happier classroom and make room for a bit more learning along the way.

References:

(1) Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Company.

(2) Koponen, T., Aro, T., Peura, P., Leskinen, M., Viholainen, H., & Aro, M. (2021). Benefits of integrating an explicit self-efficacy intervention with calculation strategy training for low-performing elementary students. Frontiers in Psychology, 3298. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714379