Think for a minute about the full range of academic behaviors on display in your classroom each day. Odds are that you have some students who raise their hand every time that you ask a question, excited to share their thoughts, while others sit passively in the back of your classroom, never volunteering to contribute.
Some take the lead on group projects, making suggestions and setting direction for their peers, while others rarely contribute ideas that move the work forward. Some lean into every homework assignment, consistently exceeding grade-level expectations and producing “hang it on the wall work”, while others consistently show up on your list of missing tasks.
So, what explains these differences? Why do some students become enthusiastic learners while others seem to give up on learning?
The answer lies in the experiences that students have our schools. Enthusiastic learners have experienced success time and again. They regularly earn the best marks on tests and quizzes. They are always on the top of class rankings. They place in the highest percentiles of standardized tests year after year.
The result: They believe in their academic abilities. That belief inspires their participation, carries them through moments when learning is hard and increases their willingness to take intellectual risks. It is easy to be confident, after all, when you see consistent evidence of your competence.
Students who have given up, however, rarely see any evidence that they are capable and competent learners.
Years of struggle – low marks on quizzes and tests, frustration with tasks that other students seem to complete with ease, confusion with concepts introduced in daily lessons – have left these learners skeptical of their own academic abilities. The result: Struggling students use avoidance as a coping strategy in any situation where they expect to fail.
As Gary Wolf – cofounder of the Quantified Self blog – explains, “We don’t try things we believe we can’t do…We simply skirt the issue. Perhaps we even convince ourselves that it is not necessary, or a waste of time. Engrained habits of avoidance can become nearly invisible to our conscious reflection, due to how effectively they guard us from the bad consequences we believe will result from failure” (Wolf, 2007).
There’s nothing surprising here, right?
Learners who believe in their own “capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations” – a trait that Albert Bandura (1995, p.2) calls self-efficacy – are successful because they are more likely to persist through academic challenge. Learners who aren’t convinced that they can be successful rarely demonstrate the persistence and motivation necessary to achieve at the highest levels.
What may surprise you is just how important self-efficacy is for learners.
High levels of self-efficacy can enhance a student’s accomplishments, feelings of personal well-being, and willingness to experiment with new ideas. Students with high levels of self-efficacy also set higher expectations for their future performance and remain calm when approaching difficult tasks (Pajares, 1996; Ormond, 2008).
And perhaps most importantly, self-efficacy has a positive impact on a student’s academic achievement. Its .82 effect size translates to a 29-percentile point gain, making self-efficacy one of the highest leverage instructional strategies that teachers can implement in their classrooms. (Marzano, Pickering & Heflebower, 2010). Helping students to develop a stronger sense of self-efficacy – which John Hattie (2009) describes as “gaining a reputation as a learner” – may have a greater impact than addressing achievement directly.
So what are YOU doing to ensure that every kid in your classroom gains a reputation as a learner?
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