Self-Efficacy

Albert Bandura's 1997 social learning theory contains the concept of self-efficacy, which is the self-perception that one can perform in ways that allow some control over life events. More specifically, self-efficacy determines one's perception that he or she can produce desired results. Self-efficacy forms the foundation of human agencypeople's willand is located in one's self-perception. Self-efficacy can be described in terms of magnitude and generality. Self-efficacy differs in the magnitude of the level of perceived difficulty of the task; the more difficult the task completed, the higher the level of self-efficacy. Accomplishing tasks spurs feelings toward other associated tasks. For those people with higher levels of self-efficacy, when a particular task is achieved, feelings of confidence are generalized to other tasks. Research indicates that children who perform well on math tasks, for example, should efficiently learn new material built on those domains.

Accurate assessment of one's skills is an important component to self-efficacythere is a developmental component to assessing one's skill. Children are less able to accurately assess their skills than are adults.

Bandura differentiated efficacy expectations from outcome expectations. Outcome expectancy is an estimation that a given behavior will lead to a certain outcome, whereas an efficacy expectation is the confidence that one can successfully execute the behavior required to accomplish the outcome. The two concepts differ when a person believes that a course of action will produce outcomes (outcome expectation) but is unsure that he or she can complete the task (efficacy expectation). Furthermore, people's expectation of their ability to successfully complete a task determines how much effort and persistence they will devote to accomplish it. Nonetheless, according to Dale Schunk in 1995, high self-efficacy will not influence behavior when people do not value the outcome.