Self-Efficacy

Over the past several decades, educators and educational psychologists have been interested in students' self-perceptions. This concerted attention to students' views of themselves is quite understandable. From the perspective of an educator, enhancing the positive self-perceptions of learners is an important educational goal. Educators desire students to become autonomous individuals who have strong and positive feelings about themselves as they engage in the myriad responsibilities and demands of school and life. Educational psychologists too have been interested in student self-perception, particularly as such perceptions may affect student motivation, persistence, and ultimately, classroom learning. The goal of the following discussion is to examine research and theory relating to learners' perceptions of self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is a central construct in Albert Bandura's social-cognitive learning theory. It is defined as an expectation that one holds regarding one's capabilities to accomplish a particular task or goal. In a most general and perhaps somewhat rough sense, self-efficacy might be thought of as a sense of confidence to act successfully. Individuals who believe that they can overcome obstacles and achieve have what is often called by social-cognitive learning theorists a sense of personal agency. Self-efficacy is an important part of one's feelings of personal agency and a crucial element of agentic views of motivated learning.

Although self-efficacy may at first glance be similar to notions of self-concept and self-esteem, it should be emphasized from the onset that it is quite separate from these other, broad self-perceptions. Self-efficacy is an expectation that is related to a given task. As such, it is a specific self-perception that is directed toward accomplishing a goal. Self-efficacy cannot be understood nor assessed without a task as the context of one's self-appraisal. In contrast, self-concept refers to one's collective self-perceptions across many different tasks and assembled from many different interactions. To be sure, self-concept is multidimensional, but it is referenced to broad domains, such as academic self-concept or physical self-concept. Self-esteem is also different from self-efficacy. As usually defined, self-esteem is a self-perception that refers to the judgment of worth that one places upon one's self. Such judgments of worth rely heavily on social norms, social comparisons, and individual values; they do not rely on one's task-related appraisals of one's capabilities to execute the requirements of a task. Rather, self-esteem focuses on self-valuing.

Self-efficacy can be distinguished further from other kinds of expectations that have been the focus of psychologists who are interested in student motivation. In particular, self-efficacy is distinct from the psychological notion of outcome expectations. These expectations concern students' beliefs regarding the consequences of achieving tasks. For example, students may fully expect a reward or other outcome when completing a task, but they may have grave doubts about their capacities to accomplish the task that would earn them such a reward. In other words, expectations of the consequences of behaviors are conceptually distinct from self-beliefs concerning enacting behaviors. The former is an outcome expectation; the latter is an efficacy expectation.