Factors of Self-Efficacy

Factors of self-efficacy are: experience, cultural expectations, gender roles and overall support for effort and risk taking. Three other factors that affect self-efficacy are: modeling, social persuasion and physiological factors.  Modeling is when children see someone else succeed at a task and their self-efficacy increases as they believe they can succeed as for well. For example, if a child sees their peer has been successful at a getting a good grade on a history test, they also believe they can get a good grade on a history test. I tried to be a model for my child's self-efficacy as I tackled things that were hard for me such as learning how to get around a new state when we moved from one to another. My daughter and I had lots of "fun" adventures as I would sometimes get us lost as I learned my new way around a new city. It showed her I could succeed at the task of learning my way around a new city.

Social persuasion is encouragement. This is when providing encouragement will help increase self-efficacy while discouragement will decrease it. For example, when a parent gives a child encouragement that they will pass the history test it increases the child's self-efficacy. If a parent tells a child they're not good at history and they're just going to fail the test the child's self-efficacy decreases. I always tried to be a positive social persuasion to my child and encourage her anyway I could. Sometimes she would get frustrated as she worked on her art projects for her art classes. I would look at the picture and tell her what I thought was working and gave suggestions of what I thought wasn't working and gave suggestions of how to work on fixing the spots that seemed working on. This allowed her to talk thing out out loud and see the picture from a different perspective and fix what she didn't think was working.

Physiological factors are when stress affects children physically such as nausea, pains or shakiness and these factors can decrease a child's self-efficacy. Some children feel nauseous and shaky because it's an experience that is kind of scary and it effects them physically and then once they have achieved the activity that increases their self-efficacy and eliminates the physiological factor of the activity. For example, when my child was small there was a small creek that ran by the side of our house. When she was learning how to ride her bike she had to ride by this small creek which scared her because she was afraid she would lose her balance and fall into the creek. I would stay with her holding onto the bike until she got past the creek until one day I didn't. She didn't know I had let go of the bike right before the creek until she turned the bike around to come back and saw that I was still standing by the creek. When I told her I had let go right before the creek she looked upset but I told her to try it again. I stayed standing where I was and she went riding by the creek again. When she got passed it she started chanting, "I did it. I did it." Once she knew she did it and did it again she then had the self-efficacy to continue to do it.