I Can Do It Well Because I Did It Well: the Effect of Promoted Self-efficacy Through Induced Success Performance in Junior High School Students

Kudo and Mori, Psychological Reports, 117, 631-642, (2015) used a presentation trick to covertly present a set of easier anagram tasks to 20 junior high school students while their 60 classmates observed more difficult tasks. These two samples were selected randomly, and their IQ scores counterbalanced. The target students outperformed their classmates, and showed greater self-efficacy after their success. However, they did not examine the relationship between this self-efficacy and performance 2 months later on another set of anagram tasks. Here, we analyzed their data in this regard. We found that those students whose self-efficacy was raised by the former task performed better than the control students whose self-efficacy ratings were in the middle range. These findings suggest that students with high self-efficacy performed better than their classmates did on new anagram tasks, even when adjusting for IQ.