Help Students Believe in Themselves
This blog post describes Bandura’s self-efficacy theory of motivation, and describes an experiment in which self-efficacy was used to boost students’ exam scores.
The six strategies for effective learning are, indeed, effective, but only to the degree that students actually use them. And in order to change behavior, we have to consider motivation. Now, motivation is an entire area of psychology and not one that we pretend to be experts in. There are many different motivational theories, but today we’re going to zoom in on just one: self-efficacy, which comes out of social learning theory. We can thank Albert Bandura for most of our theoretical understanding of self-efficacy, which is our belief in our ability to successfully accomplish any given task (1). So, we can have high self-efficacy for our ability to use retrieval practice and low self-efficacy for our ability to use spacing. We can also have high self-efficacy in, say, history, and low self-efficacy in math.
There are a lot of factors that can influence self-efficacy and Bandura placed them into four distinct categories.