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…

Self-efficacy is easily the most important construct for engagement and success in achievement contexts. In this article, we aim to promote a better understanding of theory-driven practices that foster students' self-efficacy beliefs in math, especially the practices that change young learners' mindset and gender stereotypes in math. We briefly…

The primary purpose of this study was to ascertain whether the degree to which Korean middle school students perceived their teachers to be credible made a difference in the effectiveness of teachers' persuasion as a source of students' academic self-efficacy. In the contexts of both general school learning and a specific subject of Korean…

The purposes of the present study were to investigate (a) how the subjectively perceived achievement goals of significant others would predict the academic self-efficacy and achievement goals of Korean adolescents and (b) how those self-efficacy and achievement goals in turn predicted their achievement. We also compared these predictive…

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…

The author examined predictive relations among South Korean high school students' (N = 753) perceptions of their social-psychological environments, personal motivational beliefs, and academic behavior in math. Students' perceptions of their both classroom mastery and performance goal structures predicted their personal mastery goals. Perceptions…

The relative contribution of students' capability to perceive structural versus surface similarity on their motivation transfer was studied. It was hypothesized that surface similarity would lead to greater transfer of self-efficacy among tasks due to its readily perceptible nature. More specifically, it was hypothesized that the perception of…

This study tested whether students' motivation and perceptions of the learning environment changed significantly within the school year. Korean high school girls' (N = 375) perceptions of the performance goal structures in the environment increased significantly throughout the school year. The girls' personal achievement goals and task value…

The generality of academic self-efficacy judgments was compared between groups of students with different personal characteristics, using the sample drawn from a previous study (M. Bong, 1997) (n=383). Confirmatory factor analyses showed that boys demonstrated more comparable strengths of self-efficacy across the academic domains compared to…

The degree of and the cognitive basis for the generalizability of academic self-efficacy were examined among 588 high school students from the greater Los Angeles (California) area. Students' self-efficacy perceptions clearly generalized beyond boundaries of specific tasks and also of specific school subjects, albeit to a lesser degree. There was…

A study was conducted to compare three methods of assessing course-level self-efficacy beliefs within a multitrait multimethod (MTMM) framework. The methods involved: (1) successfully performing a number of domain-related tasks; (2) obtaining specific letter grades in the course; and (3) successfully performing generic academic tasks in the…

Studied self-efficacy perceptions of 202 Korean female high school students at 3 levels of specificity in English and mathematics. Problem-specific, task-specific, and subject-specific self-efficacy beliefs all formed separate factors in both subject areas, but the three self-efficacy factors were too highly correlated to contribute independently…

The internal/external (I/E) frames of reference model proposed by H. Marsh (1986, 1990) points to the relativistic nature of academic self-concept formation. It argues that students compare their own academic ability to that of their peers in an external comparison, and they compare their own verbal skills to their mathematics skills in an…