by Cindy Nebel

The six strategies for effective learning are, indeed, effective, but only to the degree that students actually use them. And in order to change behavior, we have to consider motivation. Now, motivation is an entire area of psychology and not one that we pretend to be experts in. There are many different motivational theories, but today we’re going to zoom in on just one: self-efficacy, which comes out of social learning theory. We can thank Albert Bandura for most of our theoretical understanding of self-efficacy, which is our belief in our ability to successfully accomplish any given task (1). So, we can have high self-efficacy for our ability to use retrieval practice and low self-efficacy for our ability to use spacing. We can also have high self-efficacy in, say, history, and low self-efficacy in math.

There are a lot of factors that can influence self-efficacy and Bandura placed them into four distinct categories:

1. Previous performance. Having successfully accomplished a task in the past makes you more likely to believe you can do so in the future.

2. Vicarious experiences. Watching or hearing about someone else who has successfully accomplished a task in the past makes you more likely to believe that you can do it too.

3. Messages from others. Hearing positive, encouraging messages can help you believe in yourself.

4. Physiological state. When we are stressed or anxious about other things in our lives, that can bleed over into other activities. Reducing anxiety can support self-efficacy.

In an interesting (especially for 4 psych teachers) and fairly simple study, one researcher manipulated self-efficacy within his intro psych class by providing feedback to his students (2). Here is what he did…

After the first exam in his class, he split his students into three groups: the lowest performers, average performers, and highest performers. Then he asked all of the students (regardless of performance) to send him an email if they wanted a bonus point in class. Of those that emailed him, he further split each group of performers into two groups: neutral response or self-efficacy boost. The neutral response said something like, “Thanks. I’ve recorded your bonus point.” The self-efficacy boost was a response that included all four of the aspects above. It went something like this:

Thank you for your email. I was very impressed by your performance on ____ [assignment they did well on; previous performance]. Other students who performed similar to you have done very well in this class [vicarious experience]. I know you can do the same if you work hard and stay focused [messages from others]. When things start to get stressful, and especially before the next exam, I strongly recommend that you make sure you’re getting enough sleep and exercise and practice deep breathing [physiological state]. You should also meet with me to discuss any questions that you have.

So, it was a nice email. But here’s the most important part (in my opinion). It was JUST AN EMAIL. And most of it was copy/pasted except for the assignment that the person did well on in the course. Easy peasy. But did it work?

On Exam 1, there was no difference between the people who received the email and who didn’t. (They hadn’t received the email yet.) So we know that at baseline, these people performed similarly. So, we’re looking at Exam 2 scores to see if the self-efficacy boost impacted their scores. Here are the Exam 2 scores:

What you’ll notice here is that the light blue bars are all higher than the green bars. On average, scores went up by 5 points and while, yes, that’s not a ton, remember… this was a single email! And 5 points is still 5 points. Likely a bigger manipulation would have a bigger effect.

The Bottom Line

For all of us, believing in our ability to succeed influences our eventual success. In this study, a single email was enough to change students’ belief in their ability to succeed. We are not suggesting that you copy and paste the email above and send it to your students, but we do recommend finding ways to influence your students, children, and even yourself using the four components of self-efficacy listed above. Do it authentically and in a way that is natural to you and makes sense for the people you’re working with. And that little bit of extra encouragement and belief might make a big difference.

References:

(1) Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2). Chicago

(2) Jackson, J. W. (2002). Enhancing self-efficacy and learning performance. The Journal of Experimental Education, 70(3), 243-254.