There are many theories in what can loosely be called the science of learning, including the view that the higher the bar, the better people do, from struggle comes success etc – so students should be given lots of challenging work to do. After all, if we make the work easy, how can we be stretching our students, and how much will they actually learn? If we make the work hard, and support them, students will rise to the challenge and they will do well – or at least better.
There is clearly some truth in those theories. By definition, ‘learning’ involves the acquisition of new things – it wouldn’t be ‘learning’ otherwise – and getting new stuff into our long-term memory is no walk in the park, it’s hard. It usually requires focus and effort and regular retrieval. But there is also something to be said for boosting students’ self-efficacy by enabling them to have successful learning experiences and mastering tasks and topics on a regular basis.
In school, ‘self-efficacy’ is essentially about students’ beliefs about their ability to do a thing. The research of Bandura (2006) suggests that self-efficacy measures should be subject-specific rather than generalised and there is evidence that subject-specific measures of self-efficacy (i.e. how well I can do simple equations in Maths) are a strong predictor of actual attainment in those subjects. This has two big implications: first, that we should be wary of approaches to boosting self-efficacy that are based on inspirational quotes and motivational posters – those may feel nice to read but they aren’t going to improve a student’s sense of their ability to punctuate a sentence properly or play a chord in Music. The second implication, if self-efficacy is a strong predictor of success in a particular domain, is that teachers’ instruction should be tailored to allowing students to experience success in that domain so as to have a positive effect on their self-efficacy.
This reminds me of a personal story from my own teaching from a long time ago – I hope anyone reading this will forgive me the personal anecdote – I don’t do it much! When I was a head of Languages back in the 1990s, I recall having a particular bottom set one year in Year 9 French – they were set 5 of 5, based on their average performance over the previous year; it would be fair to say they had found French hard the previous year. I knew nothing about the research around self-efficacy at that time but my approach was very simple: I tailored the level of challenge in the work to ensure that the students could largely do it, provided they behaved well and applied themselves. This meant using a different text book from the one being used for sets 1 to 4, because I knew they would be constantly frustrated by using that other book. The text book I used was all about short-term goals and success – I still remember its name, ‘Au Secours!’, and I remember too that the students loved it – they fairly powered through the work and they would constantly be saying ‘Finished, Sir!’ and asking for more. There was some challenge, but it was carefully introduced and managed. It’s fair to say that the work was on the easy side but on the other hand, they loved it, they did learn well, and they really felt like they were improving in French – many of them regarded French as their best subject – they told me so. No, they weren’t better at French than the students in sets 1 to 4, but they had pretty high levels of self-efficacy in the subject by the time we got to the end of the year, and many of them went on to take the GCSE in French. I now know, in the jargon, that those students’ experience of regular success boosted their self-efficacy, which in turn boosted their attainment in the subject.
Take-aways
- Make sure the work is pitched at the right level of challenge, that enables students to experience success and learn too – the ‘Goldilocks Principle’
- A culture of success in the class in general can also be helpful for individual students, as students see those around them also being successful and it boosts that sense that we can do this
- Anxiety around task completion is reduced by clear explanations, modelling and scaffolding, checking for understanding and reteaching where necessary
- Discouraging mutual competition and emphasising personal progress can also help students develop self-efficacy in the domain – ‘Don’t worry that Katie can run the 400 metres faster than you, see if YOU can improve on the time you did last week’ etc
There is no question that our self-efficacy – our beliefs about our ability in a subject – affects our performance in that subject, so it is well worth investing time in boosting self-efficacy. Success breeds success.
