Pedagogical approaches, contextual variables, and the development of student self-efficacy in undergraduate physics courses

Abstract

Self-efficacy, or a person's situation-specific belief that s/he can succeed in a given task, has been successful in a variety of educational studies for predicting behaviors such as perseverance and success (grades), and for understanding which behaviors are attempted or avoided. The focus of this study was to examine if classroom factors such as teaching strategies and classroom climate contribute to students' physics self-efficacy. 121 undergraduates in first semester, calculus-based introductory physics courses completed surveys assessing course experiences, self-efficacy and other outcome variables, and demographic information. Students in sections including a mix of teaching strategies did significantly better than students in the traditional section on outcome variables including self-efficacy. When individual strategies were examined, the strongest relationships were found between cooperative learning strategies and all sources of self-efficacy, and between climate variables and all sources of efficacy.I.

Meeting students halfway: Increasing self-efficacy and promoting knowledge change in astronomy

“…Britner and colleagues have looked at levels of self-efficacy for middle school [39] and high school students [40] and what differences might exist between science domains. Other self-efficacy research focuses on college courses, including domains such as physics [37,41,42], or focuses on the selfefficacy for teaching science rather than learning science [43][44][45][46]. Investigating self-efficacy in different domains will help researchers understand the nature of this complex variable, and can lead instructors toward understanding how self-efficacy in their own content areas might be improved.…”

“…We hypothesized that postinstruction self-efficacy (compared to interest) would be more strongly related to change in understanding of star properties over the course of instruction. Based upon prior research in physics and astronomy education [41] and the study's context, we further hypothesized that all three variables (understanding, self-efficacy, and interest) would increase significantly over a semester-long course. We also predicted that an increased attention to mastery and vicarious experiences within the instructional designs and implementation could lead to improvements in these variables over the courses.…”

Beyond performance metrics: Examining a decrease in students’ physics self-efficacy through a social networks lens

“…We present this as a limitation of our study and for that reason we report on analyses of each source of self-efficacy separately, in addition to students' total score on the SOSESC-P, which we interpret as a proxy for student self-efficacy. We do so on the grounds that we found significant change on all four sources of self-efficacy and criteria established by past studies [39,44,46,47,59].…”

Development of Physics Self-Efficacy Scale

“…The investigation of relating literature shows us that many studies have been carried out in various countries on physics [3], chemistry [4], science [5,6], math's [7], science teaching [8] and biology [9]; in addition to tax research [10] and infant care [11]. As we can see, self-efficacy is adopted to many fields and disciplines.…”

“…Research in educational and vocational psychology has found that self-efficacy is very effective for explaining perseverance and success across the educational spectrum, including undergraduate education and science related majors [6].…”