Motivating Gifted Students

Self-Efficacy Beliefs

Self-efficacy is one's self-confidence to perform a specific achievement task based on a personal evaluation of past performance. For example, a student may have developed low self-efficacy for solving acceleration problems in physics because she or he struggled and performed poorly when first attempting them. A frustrating history of poor performances will likely deflate confidence and make students reluctant to continue working on these problems unless they are taught to reevaluate initial mistakes as an opportunity to learn and try again. In general, students with low self-efficacy may experience anxiety, select easier assignments or courses, stop trying, or perform poorly, not because they lack capacity but because they lack confidence in their capacity.

The research on gifted students' self-efficacy is limited but revealing. Their beliefs about math skills are both higher and more accurate than regular students. Gender differences in self-efficacy for gifted students mirror the pattern of regular students; gifted girls perform math as well as gifted boys, but beginning in high school their self-efficacy drops. Cultural expectations during middle and high school appear to play a detrimental role by socializing girls' lower self-efficacy beliefs for math. The development of gifted boys' higher self-efficacy for math during high school appears to give them a significant motivational advantage; they exhibit greater confidence for solving difficult math problems, learning from mistakes, selecting advanced math courses, and preparing for math-related careers.

Fortunately, external influences such as cultural expectations and past performances do not completely determine self-efficacy beliefs. Applying the following recommendations, educators can help gifted students to reevaluate negative external influences and strengthen their intellectual confidence: Use an authoritative teaching style to encourage and support students' challenging achievement goals; provide mastery-related feedback to assist students to achieve their goals; model effective learning strategies that demonstrate how students can achieve their goals; and offer verbal encouragement when needed. An authoritative teacher could provide both high intellectual challenge and high instructional and emotional support, especially for gifted students who lack confidence. Initially, for the class, the teacher could model and verbally highlight how to make complex acceleration problems more manageable by breaking them into smaller parts and prioritizing steps. Next, the teacher could teach students to use an effective strategy such as visually representing the key parts of the problems with a diagram. After modeling how to apply the steps and diagram, the teacher could provide individual guided practice by circulating around the room, observing students, and giving individual feedback as students work on sample problems. If the teacher observes a student making mistakes, it is possible to reassuringly attribute the student's mistakes to the need for more effort and effective strategies over which the student has internal control: “Please redo this problem again and remember to use the diagram to identify the key parts.” When the teacher observes the student correctly solving a problem, it then becomes possible to attribute this success to effort and effective strategies to build confidence: “Excellent work; I see that you correctly reworked this problem by diagramming the key parts.” If the student needs additional support, the teacher may pair him or her with another student at a slightly higher level of confidence and competence who can share personal self-efficacy stories of overcoming mistakes and using effective strategies.

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