Self-Efficacy and Achievement Behaviors

In this article self-efficacy research is reviewed in domains relevant to education. Research addressing cognitive skills, social skills, motor skills, and career choices has shown that self-efficacy is an important construct that helps to explain students' learning and performance of achievement-related behaviors. Research also has identified variables that are associated with educational contexts and that signal to students how well they are achieving or making progress in learning. These task-engagement variables include models/social comparative information, goal setting, attributional and performance feedback, strategy instruction, cognitive processing, and reward contingencies. A suggested future self-efficacy research agenda might include maintenance and generalization of changes in self-efficacy, the identification of additional task-engagement variables, instrument development and validation, integration of efficacy information from diverse sources, developmental influences on self-efficacy, and teachers' sense of efficacy.