SELF-EFFICACY 201: A PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS

Self-efficacy is the persons’ self-belief or self-perception about their capabilities and potentialities to complete the task within prescribed time on the basis of prior achievement, abilities, attributions and persuader persistency and credibility [17]. Self-efficacy is the personal judgment about whether they are able to do that particular activity or not. It shows the confidence of the students about the performance of the specific tasks within given time with perfection. Self-efficacy does not mean that students believe about their success. Actually it indicates that when students have strong belief on the skills and abilities to do any activity well, they will put required effort to complete it by keeping in view the other factors that may affect their performance. So self-efficacy is not only the belief or prediction about the competency of skills and abilities but also the ability to judge, organize, assess and tackle the forthcoming obstacles to manage the situation as they occur.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Self-Efficacy
  • Levels of Self-efficacy
    • High Self-efficacy
    • Low Self-efficacy
• Predictors of Self-efficacy
• Methodology
  • Sample
  • Instrument
  • Scoring
  • Data Analysis
• Conclusion
• Suggestive Measures to Improve Self-efficacy
• References

Abstract

Self-efficacy is the persons’ judgement about their capabilities to organize and execute the action to attain the desired level of performance. Personal belief about capabilities to complete the task successfully show the behavioral choices, persistance, performance and attitude. It helps to explain why people differ widely even having same knowledge, skills and abilities. Will I succeed or fail? Will I be liked or laughed at? Should I do it or not? Answers of these questions are based on personal efficacy (competence). Expectations of success or failure at a particular task is influenced by the sense of self-efficay in that area. High self-efficacy students engage in more effective self-regulatory strategies at each
level of ability. High self-efficacy has been demonstrated by high academic achievement. On the contrary, low self-efficay destroy the personality that leads to anxiety, depression and other negative traits. Some low self-efficacious students give up on or never begin a task that leads to failure. 264 students of secondary classes from private and government high schools of Rawalpindi were randomly selected to administer a self-prepared 21 item Likert scale. Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient was applied by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The results showed that academic achievement was associated with sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacious students are competent to approach difficult tasks to
take mastery. High self-efficacious students show their competency as they put required effort to get their targets. They are able to solve even more difficult problems. Self-efficacy increases the self competency among students.

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Introduction

Psychology focuses on motivation and it is the central concern of educational psychology. Educators take benefit from the knowledge about motivation as students reacts differently to different activities of teaching-learning. Motivation works in those areas in which students want to do work or avoid of doing activity besides having energy and even interest in that area [15].Motivation is multi-dynamic process which makes life purposive. Man can not take satisfactory success in the absence of adequate environment and for this satisfaction adequate environment should be properly charged by motivation. It is necessary to identify motivational properties of human behavior to make them better [1].It is difficult to comprehend the actual concept of human behavior without proper understanding of motivational level of organism. Total visualization of personal and non-personal experiences can not be possible without fully grasping the knowledge of motivation [6].

Read More: Behaviour Modification

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy is the optimistic belief about the dealing of challenging encounters [8]. It is not fake idea about one’s self abilities. The person is not called as self-efficacious until or unless he is able not only to face but also complete that task satisfactorily.Human endeavor are affected by self-efficacy. It is the belief of a person about the power to affect and change specific conditions and situations by their own actions, to face the challenges competently and make the choices wisely. So person’s approaches and successful completion of goals, tasks and challenges shows their strong sense of self-efficacy.

Levels of Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is categorized as high and low.

High Self-efficacy

High self-efficacious persons believe that they can do well even the difficult task. They perceive difficult task to take mastery rather than to be avoided. High self-efficacious students challenge themselves with difficult and innovative tasks and they are internally motivated. They set a high degree of effort to convene their commitments and attribute their failure to internal factors that are under their own control. If they feel disturbance to achieve their set goals, they recover quickly [11] and move to retain their mental state and ultimately achieve personal goals by encouraging themselves.Strong self-efficacious students feel fulfillment and calmness with decisiveness and certainty. They are internally motivated and self-paced [8]. People of strong self-efficacy see challenging and complex problems to be mastered, have more interest in hands-on activities, make a determined commitment to activities and goals and recover themselves in less time from disparity and disappointments [5].

Low Self-efficacy

Low efficacious students believe that they can not succeed as they are not able to concentrate and extend effort so they think that challenging tasks should be avoided. They have low aspiration that lead to fatigue, boredom and disappointment [11].They experience anxiety, hopelessness and anger [8]. They avoid complex tasks, perceive tasks beyond their access and abilities, focus on personal failure and negative and unwanted results and loose confidence quickly about their abilities [5] and feel themselves as the most depressed, deprived and unprivileged person.

Predictors of Self-efficacy

According to empirical researches, a strong predictor of success is one’s personal belief in innate dispositions to cope up then only possession of knowledge and operational skills to complete the task is not enough [8]……..

Methodology

Sample, instrument, scoring and data analysis are the part of methodology.

Sample

Instrument

Scoring

Data Analysis

Conclusion

The purpose of this article is to investigate self-efficacy of 9th and 10th class science students. Self-efficacy and academic achievement in science subjects seems to be closely related with one another. High efficacious students show their better performance in annual examination as compared to low efficacious students. High efficacy is attributed to high level of competency in academics. Similarly a positive relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievement has been found in several researches.

Suggestive Measures to Improve Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy can be improved by taking precautionary measures.

References