The Role of Social Relationships in Promoting Student Academic Self-Efficacy and MIMIC Approaches to Assess Factorial Mean Invariance

Social cognitive theory suggests that self-efficacy can be defined as an individual's perceived capability or judgment of his or her ability to plan and engage in behaviors that are needed to successfully perform a task (Bandura, 1997). As one of the key elements of motivation that assists researchers with the understanding of students' academic learning, self-efficacy beliefs have received a considerable amount of attention in educational and social research. Self-efficacy beliefs influence various domains of functioning and behavior and shape learning and performance, stated in social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997, 2001). It has been reported that high self-efficacy beliefs enhance students' academic interest and motivation (Bandura, 1986, 1997), efforts and engagements of learning (Schunk & Hanson, 1985; Pajares & Miller, 1994; Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990; Zimmerman, 2000), as well as growth of cognitive competencies and accomplished achievement (Pajares, 1996; Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990; Zimmerman, 2000). A pervading theme in various developmental and social psychological theories is the role of environmental influences in shaping individuals' achievement motivation. For example, Bandura (1997) points out in social cognitive theory that environment can affect a person's behavior and self-efficacy. One aspect of environment refers to the social environment including parents, teachers and peers. In recent decades, researchers have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of students' interpersonal relationships and related factors in students' motivation (Anderman & Kaplan, 2008). Researches focusing on the role of interpersonal relationships and social perceptions in students' academic motivation have provided valuable information about achievement motivation, yet are also limited in two ways. First, a large body of the research has focused on achievement motivation of goal orientations explaining why students achieve academically. A lot of this research, however, has neglected to include student academic self-efficacy. For example, Wentzel (1998) investigated the effects of student social relationships on achievement goal orientations and interest and revealed significant peer, teacher and parent influences. A need to further explore student social relationships with additional motivation constructs is warranted. Second, most researchers have restricted their investigations on students' relationships with an individual partner such as student-teacher relationship (e.g., Turner et al., 2002), student-peer relationship (e.g., Nelson & Debacker, 2008), or student-parent relationship (e.g., Bong, 2008). We heeded the relative paucity of sophisticated investigations assessing students' social relationships with different partners simultaneously. Third, limited research has been conducted to assess the factor mean differences on student academic self-efficacy across subgroups of students based on gender, school sector as well as school urbanicity. A few studies on motivation have revealed mean level differences in the goal structures based on academic level and subject area (Wolters & Daugherty, 2007; Wolters, Daugherty, & Fan, 2007). Other studies have detected gender differences on motivation elements including self-regulation strategies and task-related interaction (Patrick, Ryan, & Kaplan, 2007). Although the existing evidence indicates the possible noninvariance on student motivation across subgroups of students, studies investigating differences of groups based on student gender, school sector and school urbanicity in terms of student academic self-efficacy are scarce. The interest to assess the factorial mean noninvariances of student academic self-efficacy stems from the documented achievement gaps among student groups. Literature on student academic performance has well established that academic performance varies across male and female students (Fan & Chen, 1997), school sector (Carbonaro, 2006) as well as school urbanicity (Lleras, 2008). …