To encourage the lower-performing students to regard their lower performance just as favorably as the top learners – a strategy all too popular with the self-esteem movement – is a tragic mistake.
“There is no getting around the fact that most educators who speak earnestly about the need to boost students’ self-esteem are unfamiliar with the research that has been conducted on this question,” says educator and psychologist Alfie Kohn. “At best, they may vaguely assert, as I confess I used to do, that ‘studies’ suggest self-esteem is terribly important.”
Kansas State University professor Candice Shoemaker looks at the psychological constructs of “confidence” and “self-efficacy” (a fancy term for academic confidence, in this case) to evaluate the effectiveness of targeted learning objectives on student achievement.
“Confidence is a measure of one’s belief in one’s own abilities and is considered a psychological trait that is related to, but distinct from, both personality and ability traits,” she says. “An interrelated construct is ‘self-efficacy,’ which refers to a person’s belief in one’s capabilities to learn or perform behaviors. Research shows that self-efficacy influences academic motivation, learning, and achievement. “
So, what is self-efficacy? Self-efficacy is, according to psychologist Albert Bandura who originally proposed the concept, a personal judgment of "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations".
One study showed the power of self-efficacy by administering aptitude tests in high school mathematics classes. An aptitude test is a test designed to determine a person's ability in a particular skill or field of knowledge.The study separated participants into two groups: Group 1 with the top math students (z-score 2.84) and group 2 with below average math students (z-score -0.98). The students were then given fake results; group 1 students were told they had an average aptitude score for maths and group 2 had very high score. Following a semester from this study, what was found is that students from group 1 (the top students) had now dropped slightly by 0.74 z-scores and, even more surprisingly, the students from group 2 had now gone up to an ave