Self-efficacy facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Self-efficacy is your personal belief in your ability to succeed in different situations and reach your goals. It's like having confidence in yourself to do what's needed to get things done. This idea was first shared by a famous psychologist named Albert Bandura.

Your self-efficacy affects almost everything you do. It shapes what you believe you can achieve and the choices you make. For example, it influences how you approach your health, your education, and even how you learn new skills.

If you have a strong sense of self-efficacy, you see challenges as exciting opportunities to learn and grow, not as scary things to avoid. You bounce back faster from mistakes and often think that if you failed, it was because you didn't try hard enough, not because you weren't smart enough. People with high self-efficacy feel they can control tough situations, which can lead to less stress and a lower chance of feeling sad or down.

On the other hand, if you have low self-efficacy, you might see difficult tasks as threats and try to avoid them. You might focus on what you can't do instead of what you can. It's easy to lose faith in yourself after a setback. Low self-efficacy can lead to more stress and feelings of sadness.

What is Self-Efficacy?

Social Cognitive Theory

Albert Bandura, a psychologist, said that self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to succeed in specific tasks or situations. This belief is a big part of how you approach goals and challenges. Bandura's social cognitive theory explains that we learn a lot by watching others. Our actions and thoughts are often shaped by what we see other people do. Since self-efficacy comes from our experiences and how we see ourselves, it's a key part of this theory. People with high self-efficacy are more likely to see hard tasks as something they can master, not something to avoid.

Social Learning Theory

Social learning theory is about how we learn skills when we are part of a group. We learn from each other by watching, copying, and following examples. This theory helps us understand how we develop emotional and practical skills. It also helps us see ourselves and others more clearly. Self-efficacy shows what skills you believe you can offer when you are working with others.

Self-Concept Theory

Self-concept theory looks at how people understand themselves. It explains how we use clues from the world around us to form our ideas about who we are. Our successes and failures are connected to how we see ourselves and our relationships with others. This theory says that our self-concept is learned, organized, and always changing throughout our lives.

Where Does Self-Efficacy Come From?

Learning from Successes

One of the best ways to build self-efficacy is through "mastery experiences." These are times when you succeed at something yourself. When you achieve a difficult goal, especially after facing challenges, it builds your confidence and helps you keep trying.

Learning from Others

You can also build self-efficacy by watching other people. If you see someone similar to you succeed at a hard task, it can make you believe that you can do it too. However, the opposite is also true: seeing someone fail might make you doubt yourself. The more you feel like the person you're watching, the more their successes or failures will affect your own belief.

Believing in Yourself

Another way to boost self-efficacy is by strengthening your belief that you can succeed. When people are told they have the ability to complete a task, they often try harder and for longer. This also helps reduce self-doubt. It's important that the people encouraging you put you in situations where you have a good chance of succeeding. If you're put in a task that's too hard too soon, it can actually lower your self-efficacy.

How You Feel Physically and Emotionally

Your feelings and physical state can also affect your belief in your abilities. When you're trying to figure out what you can do, you often pay attention to how your body feels. For example, if you're doing something physical, you might feel tired or have a small ache. How you interpret these feelings impacts your self-efficacy. Do you see them as a sign you can't do it, or just a normal part of trying hard?

How Self-Efficacy Affects You

Your Choices and Actions

People usually avoid tasks where they feel they won't do well, but they are more likely to try tasks where they feel confident. If your self-efficacy is much higher than your actual ability, you might think tasks are easier than they are. If it's much lower, it can stop you from trying new things and learning. Research shows that the best level of self-efficacy is a little bit higher than your current ability. This encourages you to take on challenges and gain more experience.

Your Motivation

High self-efficacy can affect how motivated you are. Generally, people with high self-efficacy are more likely to try hard to finish a task and keep going for longer than those with low self-efficacy. The stronger your belief in yourself, the more effort you will put in.

A negative side of low self-efficacy is that it can lead to something called Learned helplessness. This is when you believe that no matter how much effort you put in, it won't make a difference. This feeling can make you give up easily.

Your Performance at School or Work

Self-efficacy is very important for how well people do at school or in their jobs. Studies show that having high self-efficacy is strongly linked to better performance. For very complex tasks, the link might be a bit weaker than for simpler ones. In real-life situations, where there might be challenges or unclear instructions, the connection can also seem weaker than in a controlled setting. This means that teachers and managers should give clear instructions and support, like training, to help students and employees build their self-efficacy along with their skills.

Your Thoughts and Reactions

Self-efficacy also affects how you think and react:

If you have low self-efficacy, you might think tasks are harder than they really are. If you have high self-efficacy, you might think they are easier. This can sometimes lead to poor planning or more stress.
People with low self-efficacy might act unsure or unpredictable when doing a task.
People with high self-efficacy tend to look at the bigger picture to find the best way to do a task.
Challenges often make people with high self-efficacy try even harder. But someone with low self-efficacy might get discouraged and give up.
If you have high self-efficacy and you fail, you might blame outside reasons, like a hard test or not enough sleep. If you have low self-efficacy, you might blame your own lack of ability. For example, a student with high self-efficacy in math might say a bad test grade was because the test was tricky. A student with low self-efficacy might think it's because they are just bad at math.

Your Health Habits

Many studies have looked at how self-efficacy helps people adopt healthy habits. When you have more confidence in your ability to be healthy, you are more likely to make healthy choices. This can lead to a better quality of life. Your self-efficacy beliefs decide if you will start a healthy habit, how much effort you will put in, and how long you will stick with it, even when things get tough. It also influences how big your health goals are, like deciding to cut down on smoking or to quit completely.

Control Over Your Life

Albert Bandura showed that different levels of self-efficacy are linked to different ways of seeing the world. People with high self-efficacy generally believe they are in control of their own lives. They think their actions and choices shape their future. People with low self-efficacy might feel that their lives are controlled by things outside of them. For example, a student with high self-efficacy who does poorly on an exam might think it's because they didn't study enough. A student with low self-efficacy might believe the test was too hard, which they can't control.

Factors That Affect Self-Efficacy

Bandura identified four main factors that influence self-efficacy:

Experience (Mastery) - Your own past successes are the most important factor. Success makes your self-efficacy go up, while failure can lower it. As psychologist Erik Erikson said, children gain real strength from truly achieving things that matter to them.
Modeling (Watching Others) - This is the idea of "If they can do it, I can do it too." When you see someone succeed, your own self-efficacy can increase. When you see people fail, it can decrease. This works best if you feel similar to the person you are watching.
Social Persuasion (Encouragement) - This means direct encouragement or discouragement from others. Discouragement usually lowers self-efficacy more strongly than encouragement raises it.
Physiological Factors (Body Signals) - In stressful situations, your body might show signs like shaking, aches, or nervousness. How you understand these signs can change your self-efficacy. For example, if you get "butterflies in your stomach" before speaking in public, someone with low self-efficacy might see it as a sign they can't do it. Someone with high self-efficacy might see it as a normal feeling that doesn't mean they lack ability. It's your belief about these body signals that matters, not the signals themselves.

How Self-Efficacy is Used

In School

Parents' belief in their child's academic abilities is linked to how well their children do in school. If parents have high hopes and beliefs for their child's school success, the child often shares those beliefs. This helps the child's academic self-efficacy, leading to better school performance. It also encourages helpful behavior and reduces feelings of hopelessness or sadness.

In one study, students felt they had trouble listening in class. Teachers then helped them learn different strategies to improve their listening. As students found strategies that worked, their self-efficacy improved.

In Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)

Self-efficacy is very helpful for college students exploring careers in STEM fields. For example, how confident you are in your math skills is a better sign of your interest in math, the math classes you choose, and if you major in math, than your past math grades.

Self-efficacy theory has been used to understand why fewer women are in STEM fields like math and engineering. It was found that differences in self-efficacy beliefs between genders strongly influence career choices for young women.

Confidence in using technology is also important for learning computer programming. Students who feel more confident with technology tend to learn better. This effect was even stronger than the effect of gender.

In Writing

Research shows a strong link between how confident writers feel about themselves and their motivation and writing results. Students' success in school is connected to their self-belief and motivation. Writers who are very confident in their abilities usually work harder and produce better writing. They also value the writing activities where they have succeeded. Writers who are confident in their writing skills are more willing to work hard to write well. In contrast, those who feel less confident might give up easily and avoid writing if they see it as a difficult experience.

Studies have shown that poor writing is often caused by writers doubting their own ability, rather than a lack of actual skill. Even if you have the skills, self-doubt can stop you from doing your best. A study in 1997 with 5th graders found a direct link between students' self-efficacy and their writing anxiety, essay performance, and how useful they thought writing was. This showed how important it is for teachers to teach skills and also build students' confidence. More recent studies have confirmed these findings. When students feel more positive about their writing, they perform better.

Motivation in Writing

Motivation is closely linked to self-efficacy in writing. Motivation can be internal (doing something because you enjoy it) or external (doing something for a reward). Internal motivation often works better because students see the task as valuable on its own. Writers who are internally motivated tend to be more independent, take control of their writing, and feel more capable of setting and reaching goals. Self-efficacy influences student choices, effort, how long they persist, their thought patterns, and their feelings when doing a writing assignment. Students with high self-efficacy are more likely to try new writing tasks and stick with them.

Writing Performance

Self-efficacy is often connected to how well students write. More than any other factor, self-efficacy beliefs have been shown to predict writing performance. Studies have created scales to measure students' self-efficacy in writing and then compared these scores to their writing samples. Self-efficacy was the only factor that strongly predicted writing performance.

Public Speaking

There is a strong link between how anxious someone feels about speaking in public and their self-efficacy. The more confident you are, the less anxious you might feel.

Healthcare

Self-efficacy is becoming more important in healthcare. It helps people adopt, start, and keep healthy behaviors, and also helps them stop unhealthy ones. Healthcare providers can help patients build their self-efficacy. For example, they can show patients examples of others who have made healthy changes. Nurses can also follow up with patients after they leave the hospital to reinforce education and reassure them about managing their health at home.

Other Areas

Self-efficacy has also been studied in other areas. For example, researchers found that how confident people feel about using the internet affects how much they use online services.

Self-efficacy is also part of what's called "core self-evaluations," which is your basic view of yourself. This includes your self-efficacy, how much control you feel you have over your life, and your self-esteem. Core self-evaluations can predict how satisfied you are with your job and how well you perform.

Researchers have also looked at self-efficacy in balancing work and life. They found that believing you can balance your work and personal responsibilities helps explain how work-life balance leads to job and family satisfaction. It also helps people stay engaged at work even when they have many demands from both work and family.

Types of Self-Efficacy

While self-efficacy can be measured generally, it's also looked at in specific situations.

Social Self-Efficacy

Social self-efficacy is your confidence in your ability to interact with others. This includes making friends, starting romantic relationships, being assertive, performing in public, joining groups, and giving or receiving help. It can also mean confidence in knowing what to do in social situations and actually doing it.

Researchers suggest that social self-efficacy is strongly connected to shyness and social anxiety.

Academic Self-Efficacy

Academic self-efficacy is your belief that you can successfully complete school tasks. This includes achieving course goals, finishing assignments, getting good grades, and meeting requirements for your chosen major.

Positive feelings about school, like pride and enjoyment, are often influenced by your level of self-efficacy. When your self-efficacy increases, you are more likely to feel positive emotions about your schoolwork.

Eating Self-Efficacy

Eating self-efficacy is your belief that you can resist the urge to eat, especially when you're trying to manage your eating habits.

Other Types

Other areas where self-efficacy is studied include teacher self-efficacy (a teacher's belief in their ability to teach effectively) and technological self-efficacy (confidence in using technology).

What's the Difference?

Self-efficacy vs. Efficacy: Efficacy means the power to produce a result or being good at something. Self-efficacy is your belief (whether it's true or not) that you have that power to get a task done. It's your belief in your own ability.

Self-efficacy vs. Self-esteem: Self-efficacy is about your belief in your ability to reach a goal. Self-esteem is about how much you value yourself. For example, someone might be terrible at rock climbing and have low self-efficacy for it, but if rock climbing isn't important to them, it won't affect their self-esteem. On the other hand, someone could be very confident at rock climbing (high self-efficacy) but still have low self-esteem if they set extremely high standards for themselves and base too much of their self-worth on climbing.

Self-efficacy vs. Confidence: The psychologist Albert Bandura explains that self-efficacy is a specific type of confidence. It's confidence in your ability to perform a specific action or task.

Self-efficacy vs. Self-concept: Self-efficacy is about believing you can do specific actions. Self-concept is a broader idea that includes how you see your own abilities and how you feel about yourself because of those abilities. In school, your confidence in writing an essay is self-efficacy. Your self-concept, however, might be how your intelligence affects your overall sense of worth as a person.

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