2.1 Motivation: self-efficacy and expectancy-value

Self-efficacy

In addition to being influenced by their goals, interests, and attributions , students’ motives are affected by specific beliefs about the student’s personal capacities. In self-efficacy theory the beliefs become a primary, explicit explanation for motivation (Bandura, 1977, 1986, 1997). Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that he/she is capable of carrying out a specific task or of reaching a specific goal. Note that the belief and theaction or goal are specific. Your self-efficacy is your beliefs about whether or not you can write an acceptable term paper, for example, or repair an automobile, or make friendswith the new student in class. These are relatively specific beliefs and tasks. Self-efficacy is not about whether you believe that you are intelligent ingeneral, whether you always like working with mechanical things, or think that you are generally a likeable person. These more general judgments are betterregarded as various mixtures of self-concepts (beliefs about general personal identity) or of self-esteem (evaluations of identity). They are important in their own right, and sometimes influence motivation, but only indirectly (Bong&Skaalvik, 2004).

Self-efficacy beliefs, furthermore, are not the same as “true” or documented skill or ability. They are self- constructed, meaning that they are personally developed perceptions. There can sometimes therefore be discrepancies between a person’s self-efficacybeliefs and the person’s abilities. You can believe that you can write a good term paper, for example, without actually being able to do so, and viceversa: you can believe yourself in capable of writing a paper, but discover that you are in fact able to do so. In this way self-efficacy is like the everyday idea of confidence , except that it is defined more precisely. And as with confidence, it is possible to have either too much or too little self-efficacy. The optimum level seems to be either at or slightly above true capacity (Bandura, 1997). As we indicate below, large discrepancies between self-efficacy and ability can create motivational problems for the individual.

Effects of self-efficacy on students’ behavior

Self-efficacy may sound like a uniformly desirable quality, but research as well as teachers’ experience suggests that its effects are a bit morecomplicated than they first appear. Self-efficacy has three main effects, each of which has both a negative or undesirable side and a positive or desirableside.

Choice of tasks

The first effect is that self-efficacy makes students more willing to choose tasks where they already feel confident of succeeding. While this seemsintuitive, given the definition of the concept of self-efficacy, it has also been supported by research on self-efficacy beliefs (Pajares&Schunk, 2001). For teachers, the effect on choice can be either welcome or not,depending on circumstances. If a student believes that he or she can solve mathematical problems, then the student is more likely to attempt themathematics homework that the teacher assigns.