Teaching practices for self-efficacy

Teaching practices for improving student self-efficacy

Teaching Practices

As instructors we can influence self-efficacy in our students through our teaching. Improved self-efficacy can then lead to improved outcomes for our students. Look at the pages below to examine teaching practices targeted at each of the four sources of self-efficacy. Also, see the background information on social cognitive theory below.

Mastery Experiences

Vicarious Learning

Social Persuasion

Emotional Arousal

Social Cognitive Theory - Overview

Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, and Hackett, 1994; 2000) consists of three interlocking models that explain the development of career-related interests, choice goals, and performance. SCCTs core components include the variables of self-efficacy (i.e., confidence in one’s ability to successfully perform a domain-specific task), outcome expectations (i.e., anticipated outcomes of a particular behavior), interests (i.e., patterns of likes and dislikes for career activities), and goals (i.e., determination for a particular activity or outcome).

Bandura’s (1977; 1986) social cognitive theory is at the core of SCCT in that the social cognitions of self-efficacy and outcome expectations are the key mechanisms through which individuals develop career-related interests and goals. Self-efficacy is a heavily researched psychological construct. Self-efficacy is influenced by performance accomplishments (PA), vicarious learning (VL), social persuasion SP), and emotional arousal (EA; Bandura 1997). Self-efficacy can ultimately determine whether someone will avoid or approach certain career options, the quality of performance, and their persistence when faced with obstacles (Betz, 2000). Self-efficacy is not a trait concept, but a cognitive appraisal of judgement of future performance capabilities (Betz and Hackett, 2006). As such, it must be domain specific and measured against some type of behavior. In the proposed study, we will assess self-efficacy in the engineering domain.

Most importantly self-efficacy is malleable. Instructors can improve or reduce self-efficacy in our students through our teaching.

Sources of Self-efficacy

Performance accomplishments are a major source of self-efficacy beliefs. They are past direct experiences that demonstrate to a person that they are able to perform a task (i.e. if you have done it before, you can do it again). High self-efficacy evolves from success in past experiences and low self-efficacy from failures at activities within the given domain.

Vicarious experiences are observations of others successfully completing a task (i.e. if they can do it so can I). However, since observing is not a direct reflection on one’s one skill it is believed to have a weaker influence on self-efficacy relative to other sources.

Social persuasion is encouragement from others. It can take the form of either positive encouragement to perform a task which will increase self-efficacy or negative discouragement often in the form of discrimination and bias that will decrease self-efficacy.

Emotional arousal are the emotions generated around performing the task. Although they can be positive, they often takes the form of anxiety or fear about a given task. This anxiety has been shown to be driven by the stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995) in which members of a group for which there is a negative stereotype may experience performance anxiety.

Outcomes Expectations

Although self-efficacy has received the most research attention in Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory, outcome expectations are also believed to serve a unique role in driving behaviors. Outcome expectations refer to the expected outcomes for engaging in a particular behavior, and can include positive, negative, or neutral anticipated consequences. Bandura (1986) identified categories of outcome expectations to include social, material, and self-evaluative outcomes. Bandura hypothesizes that outcome expectations are determined by self-efficacy beliefs, as people will expect positive outcomes for activities that they possess strong self-efficacy.

SCCT assumes that the four learning experiences [performance accomplishments, vicarious learning, social persuasion, and emotional arousal] that help to shape self-efficacy beliefs also inform outcome expectations. Although Lent and colleagues (1994) originally hypothesized that contextual supports had an indirect effect on self-efficacy and outcome expectations via their effects on learning experiences, research suggests that contextual variables exert a direct effect to self-efficacy and outcome expectations (Lent et al., 2018).

By practicing teaching targeted at improving self-efficacy we can also help students reach possible outcomes like persistence, performance, and approach vs. avoidance. This has been shown to be particularly beneficial to students from underrepresented groups.