Of his numerous contributions, Albert Bandura's introduction of the self-efficacy construct is arguably the most notable one. The primary aim of this article is to illustrate why it is so critically important to arm students with strong self-efficacy beliefs and how parents and teachers can achieve that goal. We begin with a brief overview of the…

We tested the interaction between task value and self-efficacy on defensive pessimism, academic cheating, procrastination and self-handicapping among 574 Korean 11th graders in the context of English as a foreign language. We hypothesised that perceiving high value in tasks or domains for which self-efficacy was low would pose a threat to…

The authors examined whether self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-esteem show differential predictive utility for academic achievement across age groups and domains. More specifically, the relationships of 3 self-constructs with achievement were examined in mathematics for elementary school students and mathematics and language arts for middle…

Whether students' verbal and mathematics self-concepts were indeed positively correlated after an external comparison, and negatively correlated after an internal comparison, as predicted by the internal/external frames of reference model (H. Marsh, 1986), was studied with 383 high school students. Results support most of the model predictions.…