0.2 Self-efficacy  (Page 5/6)

For teachers, this suggests two things. The first, of course, is that encouragement can motivate students, especially when it is focused onachievable, specific tasks. It can be motivating to say things like: “I think you can do it” or “I’ve seen you do this before, so Iknow that you can do it again.” But the second implication is that teachers should arrange wherever possible to support their encouragement bydesigning tasks at hand that are in fact achievable by the student. Striking a balance of encouragement and task difficulty may seem straightforward, butsometimes it can be challenging because students can sometimes perceive teachers’ comments and tasks quite differently from how teachers intend.Giving excessive amounts of detailed help, for example, may be intended as support for a student, but be taken as a lack of confidence in thestudent’s ability to do the task independently.

Emotions related to success, stress or discomfort

The previous three sources of efficacy beliefs are all rather cognitive or “thinking oriented,” but emotions also influence expectations ofsuccess or failure. Feeling nervous or anxious just before speaking to a large group (sometimes even just a class full of students!) can function like amessage that says “I’m not going to succeed at doing this,” even if there is in fact good reason to expect success. But positive feelingscan also raise beliefs about efficacy. When recalling the excitement of succeeding at a previous, unrelated task, people may overestimate their chancesof success at a new task with which they have no previous experience, and are therefore in no position to predict their efficacy.

For teachers, the most important implication is that students’ motivation can be affected when they generalize from past experience which they believe,rightly or wrongly, to be relevant. By simply announcing a test, for example, a teacher can make some students anxious even before the students find outanything about the test—whether it is easy or difficult, or even comparable in any way to other experiences called “tests” in theirpasts.

Conversely, it can be misleading to encourage students on the basis of their success at past academic tasks if the earlier tasks were not really relevant to requirements of the new tasks at hand. Suppose, for example, that a middle-years student has previously written only brief opinion-based papers, and never written a research-based paper. In that case boosting the student’s confidence by telling him that “it is just like the papers you wrote before” may not be helpful or even honest.

Expectancy-value theory

By now, it should be clear that motivation is affected by several factors, including reinforcement for behavior, but especially also students’ goals,interests, and sense of self-efficacy. The factors combine to create two general sources of motivation: students’ expectation of success and thevalue that students place on a goal. Viewing motivation in this way is often called the expectancy-value model of motivation (Wigfield&Eccles, 2002; Wigfield, Tonk,&Eccles, 2004), and sometimes written with a multiplicative formula: expectancy x value = motivation. The relationshipbetween expectation and value is “multiplicative” rather than additive because in order to be motivated, it is necessary for a person to haveat least a modest expectation of success and to assign a task at least some positive value. If you have high expectations of success but do not value atask at all (mentally assign it a “0” value), then you will not feel motivated at all. Likewise, if you value a task highly but have noexpectation of success about completing it (assign it a “0” expectancy), then you also will not feel motivated at all. Dr. Eccles explainsExpectancy-Value theory in the classroom in this brief article .