Self-Efficacy and Student Engagement

A current trend in education is to “engage students in interesting real-world issues”. Project-Based Learning, Problem-Based Learning, Learning Communities (structured around a theme), Integrated Learning are enjoying their moment on the stage. The simple idea, at least in the world of educational punditry, is that if you get Motivation right, Learning will follow. Real life is of course more complex and rarely just due to a single issue.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with engaging students by providing a thematic approach that might be of personal interest to students. (I’ve done a Potions theme and a New Elements theme recently.) A student who is interested in something is likely to desire learning more, and willing to work at it. The problem is when this approach takes center stage, and leads to poorer learning outcomes. “Hmmm, that didn’t work as well as we anticipated. Let’s try a different theme or approach the theme in a different way.” I’ve heard this before. If it’s an instructor talking about a particular course, maybe there is something unique about that particular situation. When it is an administrator discussing this in a college-wide or school-wide initiative, it potentially siphons off resources, energy and goodwill among teachers. Worse, it may not benefit learning.

A better approach is to design activities in your courses aimed at building Self-Efficacy rather than Motivation. This is discussed in a thoughtful paper by Linnenbrink and Pintrich. The citation and abstract are provided in the figure below.

Let’s start with a definition of self-efficacy. The authors refer to this as “people’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance.” Let’s break it down. First, it is not the same as self-esteem. Judging whether you can perform an activity is different from you feeling good or bad about your performance. Second, it is specific and situational. It’s not “I’m good at math” but more akin to “I’m still confident I can solve these quadratic equations today, even though [algebra was a while back]”. Third, it is situational. For example, “a student’s self-efficacy for learning and doing well in a math class may be lower than usual because the teacher uses a grading  curve and the student thinks that all the other students are very competitive and better in math.” The student’s perception may change in a different classroom with a different teacher.

How is self-efficacy related to student engagement, and hence to learning? The authors classify three types of engagement. (1) Behavioral engagement can be observed by the teacher who can see if students “work hard at the task or are distracted or are putting forth only minimal effort”. (2) Cognitive engagement is more difficult to observe because we can’t see what’s going on in the students’ minds. One can get some measure of engagement by listening to what students are saying or asking. Another is to find out the extent that students use metacognitive strategies. (3) Motivational engagement is related to the affective experiences of the student while learning. These may be due to personal interest, perceived utility, or value beliefs related to life goals.

According to the authors, all three categories are inter-related. There is also no doubt that emotions affect learning, but is giving Motivation primacy the best approach for engaged learning? I’m not so sure. Trying to grab student interest is fleeting unless you have a very small class and you know how to hook all the students. The authors write: “This interest-first perspective is a strong belief in our culture, and teachers often worry over how to interest their students in the content, as they see interest as a prerequisite to all learning and future motivation. The interest-first pathway may be one path to motivation and learning, but current research on self-efficacy and motivation suggests that there may be other pathways…” They highlight research that connects self-efficacy to the three types of engagement mentioned above. I won’t go into the details here, but I encourage reading their article in full. I will summarize the results by saying that there seems to be a stable correlation between building self-efficacy and the motivation-learning virtuous cycle. Becoming competent (and building competency) is a strong motivating factor for generating interest and further learning; it may even be the most salient contributing factor in general. (The authors are careful to note the nature of generalizable results through statistical studies in educational psychology and related areas.)

How does one build self-efficacy? (1) By teaching the students how to have an accurate sense of their current abilities (using metacognitive strategies!). (2) By giving the students task in their zone of proximal development, i.e., not too easy, not too hard, providing a challenge that is within one’s grasp. (3) By reminding the students to reflect on how their abilities have changed (improved!) as they work at learning more and more. The authors suggest that “generally, self-efficacy beliefs should be a little higher than actual skill level, but not so high as to reflect a gross overestimation of actual expertise.” (4) By providing feedback aimed at self-efficacy in the specific domain rather than generalized self-esteem boosts.

Okay then. More food-for-thought as I work on my classes next semester.