I’ve been spending some time exploring the concept of self-efficacy, particularly as it relates to the role of student affairs professionals. Self-efficacy can be defined as “the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations. In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation” (http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/self_efficacy.htm).
It appears increasing self-efficacy may also be a tactic to helping students along other developmental processes such as identity development, self-authorship, and moral development. Basically, if we can help students develop self-efficacy, then we can help them:
1. Do well academically.
2. Develop a sense of confidence to succeed in a diverse college environment (sometimes in spite of hurdles they have overcome).
3. Become sound and ethically grounded leaders
4. Intervene when there is a problem.
The University of Memphis Division of Student Affairs has adopted self-efficacy as one of its learning objectives, which we call the Vision for Students. Self-efficacy can be mapped back to any of the six CAS Learning Domains, particularly cognitive complexity and its dimension of critical thinking. We can also find that self-efficacy is implicit as we seek to develop the Student Learning and Development core competency in the ACPA/NASPA Professional Competency Areas for Student Affairs Practice.
I’m fortunate to have a great supervisor who studied self-efficacy of women in STEM programs. I recently interviewed her to learn more about self-efficacy and the recording of this 14 minute interview can be found here.
What do you do to influence students’ self-efficacy? How can we be more intentional about prioritizing self-efficacy as a desired student affairs goal?
Stan Dura provided some great thoughts on this post but in the wrong place :-). Here is his post:
128.223.38.158
Submitted on 2012/10/31 at 12:06 pm
A focus on SE is a laudable goal, and likely a more practical handhold than self-authorship in terms of what student affairs professionals should reach for.
That said, self-efficacy is itself broad and complex, and invites the same plausible but immeasurable conceptual rationalizations that we find in most student affairs learning outcomes. Yes, struggling with a conduct related experience can help a student learn about their impact on the community, but there are many things they can learn and what they learn is impacted by what they bring to the learning experience, including their self-efficacy. While conceptually possibly, there are many other possibilities in terms of what the student might learn, and we have no way of discerning what was actually learned. The conceptual rationalization is rather week when considered in a more critical fashion.
Self efficacy involves elements of motivation, attribution, metacognition, and more. In order for us to hang our hats on Self-efficacy, we need to understand its components and be able to apply those components at the individual level. For example, when working with a student on a conduct case, we would need to recognize what their attributions tell us about their self-efficacy in the context of the goals that led to the behavior in question, and employ more empowering experiences as sanctions. To make those experiences effective, we would to understand the mechanisms of motivation within them. We tend to focus on the community impact and not the individual’s goals that directly led to the behavior, and rarely do we consider motivational theory in that process.
Thus, self-efficacy can be a very useful construct in our efforts, but to produce in any meaningful difference in terms of our impact, we must move beyond a superficial understanding of it and apply that understanding at the behavioral level rather than the conceptual level.