Self-Efficacy Perspective On Achievement Behavior

This article examines the idea that perceived self-efficacy is an important variable in understanding achievement behavior. Self-efficacy refers to personal judgments of one's capability to organize and implement behaviors in specific situations. Students gain information about their level of self-efficacy from selfperformances, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological indices. In forming efficacy judgments, people take into account factors such as perceived ability, task difficulty, effort expenditure, performance aids, and outcome patterns. Even when students acquire efficacy information from selfperformances, efficacy judgments are not mere reflections of those performances because educational practices differ in the type of information they convey about students' capabilities. Some experimental tests of these ideas are summarized along with their educational implications. The self-efficacy framework is compared with locus of control, attribution, and self-worth theories of achievement behavior. Article: Recent advances in instructional psychology have led to growing interest in how students structure and employ knowledge during the learning process (Resnick, 1981). The ways that students process information in learning situations seem fruitful to explore, because instructional procedures alone cannot fully account for students' diverse achievement patterns. There is increasing evidence that personal cognitions exert important effects on achievement behavior (Bandura, 1982; Covington & Beery, 1976; DeCharms, 1968; Harter, 1978; Kukla, 1972; Moulton, 1974; Rotter, 1966; Weiner, 1979). Although these views differ in certain ways, they all stress the idea that students' achievement expectancies affect behavior. This article addresses the idea that perceived self-efficacy is an important variable in understanding achievement behavior. Self-efficacy refers to personal judgments of one's capability to organize and implement actions in specific situations that may contain novel, unpredictable, and possibly stressful features (Bandura, 1977a, 1981, 1982), Self-efficacy is hypothesized to influence choice of activities (Bandura, 1977a), Students who hold a low sense of efficacy for accomplishing a task may attempt to avoid it, whereas those who feel more efficacious should participate more eagerly. Self-efficacy also is hypothesized to affect effort expenditure and task persistence (Bandura, 1977a). Especially when facing obstacles, individuals who hold a high sense of efficacy should work harder and persist longer than those who doubt their capabilities (Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Brown & Inouye, 1978; Schunk, 1981). I first will discuss some ways that students acquire information about their level of efficacy in achievement situations. The central idea here is that educational practices differ in the type of information they convey. In turn, perceptions of self-efficacy are hypothesized to affect students' task motivation and skill acquisition. Some experimental tests of these propositions will be summarized along with their educational implications. The article will conclude with a comparison of the self-efficacy model to other views of achievement behavior. Acquisition of Efficacy Information According to Bandura (1981, 1982), people acquire information about their level of efficacy from four sources: self-performances, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological indices. Self-performances are hypothesized to offer quite reliable guides for assessing self-efficacy. In general, successes should raise one's level of efficacy whereas failures should lower it, although once a strong sense of efficacy is developed an occasional failure should not have much effect, In school, students also acquire information about their own capabilities vicariously through knowledge of others. The literature on modeling supports the idea that similar others offer the best basis for comparison (Bandura, 1971; Brown & Inouye, 1978; Rosenthal & Bandura, 1978). Observing peers perform a task can convey a vicarious sense of efficacy to students that they can complete the task as well (Schunk & Carbonari, in press), Vicarious experiences arc hypothesized to have a weaker effect on efficacy than self-performances because a vicarious increase in efficacy can be negated by subsequent unsuccessful personal efforts. Third, students often receive information through suggestion or exhortation — as from teachers — that they possess certain capabilities. Although positive persuasory feedback can promote a student's sense of efficacy for performing well on a task, this in. crease is apt to be short-lived if the student subsequently performs poorly. Finally, students acquire some efficacy information through physiological indices. For example, emotional symptoms such as trembling or sweating before a test could be interpreted by students that they may not be capable of per-forming well. Information acquired from these sources does not influence self-efficacy in 'an automatic fashion; instead, the effect of such information on self-efficacy depends upon how it is cognitively appraised (Bandura, 1977a). Efficacy appraisal is an inferential process in which persons weight and combine the contributions of both personal and situational factors (Bandura, 1981). In forming efficacy judgments, people take into account various factors, such as their perceived ability, the difficulty of the task, amount of effort expended, amount of external aid received, and pattern of successes and failures, among others (Bandura, 1981; Schunk Carbonari, in press). Even when students acquire efficacy information from self-performances, subsequent efficacy judgments are not mere reflections of those performances (Bandura, 1982: Schunk, 1981). This is because educational practices differ in how they influence students' efficacy judgments. For example, in the context of competency development students should begin to develop a sense of efficacy as they work at a task and experience some success. Some educational practices may validate this sense of efficacy by clearly conveying that students are becoming more capable, which should sustain task motivation and lead to further increases in self-efficacy and skills. Other practices may offer ambiguous information about students' capabilities, or even convey in. formation to the effect that students are not particularly skillful, In these latter situations, increases in selfefficacy and skills should be lower than those resulting from efficacy-validating practices. In short, educational practices constitute an important contextual influence on students' percepts of efficacy. In the research discussed below, the subjects were. children who had encountered repeated difficulties with the experimental task (subtraction or division) in school. Because these subjects initially lacked skills and a sense of efficacy for performing the ta.sk, the development of self-efficacy could be studied as a function of different treatments and could be related to skill acquisition. The studies are discussed under three broad headings: attributional feed. back, goal setting and social comparison, and reward contingencies. I believe that this research supports the ideas that self-efficacy is an important variable in understanding students' achievement behavior and that these processes are important contextual influences on students' efficacy judgments.