Annapurna Vadaparty
When students struggle, we may assume they lack skill, motivation, or both. But sometimes, what they lack is harder to see and address: belief in themselves.
What is self efficacy?
What kinds of students tend to do well, and what kinds tend to struggle? Students who do well are the ones who work hard and know the content well, but…who gets the level of knowing the content well? If you didn’t think you could ever learn the content well enough to succeed in the course, would you bother to try? Maybe not. You need to believe that you have the ability to work hard and master the skills for that class in order to bother to try. More broadly, you need to have the belief that you can change your outcomes with your actions. In other words, you need to have belief in yourself to effect change. This is what we call self efficacy. Someone with high self efficacy believes that they have a high ability to change their outcomes with their actions, whereas someone with low self efficacy doesn’t.
What does self efficacy (or lack thereof) look like?
What does it look like when students don’t have this belief? It’s different from when students are nervous and think they might not quite get the grade they want. A lot of students might say things like “Oh my gosh, I’m going to fail the exam!”; this statement alone doesn’t necessarily tell you that they really don’t believe they can master the content. A nervous student who’s just overwhelmed at the moment might say something like that, but deep down they know that they’ll do pretty well if they buckle down. A student with low self efficacy, however, might do things like procrastinate a lot because every time they envision doing an assignment or studying for an exam, they truly don’t think they’ll be able to make any headway on it. They might also show signs of checking out of the course entirely because, again, they don’t think they’d be able to succeed no matter how hard they try. These are the students that we really want to get through to, and encourage them with the messaging that everyone can learn to program.
What contributes to self efficacy?
So we want students to believe that they can actually effect the change they want; that is, we want students to have high self efficacy. How do we do that? Let’s look at the factors that affect self efficacy. Many researchers have studied this, and one of them is Albert Bandura whose framework of self efficacy we explore here.
Mastery Experiences: Past wins give us faith in future wins.
First is mastery experiences. When you've succeeded before, you know you can do it again. If you’ve done well on a hard exam in the past, you can think back to that experience and know that you have the capability to do it again this time. This is one of the reasons why self efficacy in introductory programming is actually tricky to build, especially for students who have no prior experience. If you think about a math class, you probably know the types of things that you have to do when you study. You do a bunch of practice problems. What do you do when you get a problem wrong? Maybe you go look at the solution and then try a similar problem. Keep doing that till you get that type of problem right without looking at the answer. Now you feel confident that you’ll be able to do that type of problem if you see it on the exam. So you’ve gone through this mastery experience for math classes before, and that’s given you some self efficacy in math. You know what it feels like to work through and overcome the difficulties of a math class. Same for English and other subjects we all did in K12. . Some students may have stronger mastery experiences with activities like sports, or a job you’ve had. All of these contribute to increases in overall self efficacy, but there are some experiences unique to programming that students with no prior experience will need to build self efficacy in.
What’s unique about mastery experiences in a programming class? Programming isn’t exactly the same as Math or English or Natural science…it has other experiences you have to learn how to navigate. Think about how you learned how to handle error messages. They’re kind of their own language to learn. It’s the first time a lot of these students are having the experience of coding and feeling the unique mix of fear and frustration we all know when you get an error message. It has technical challenges like math but also semantic and natural-language-like challenges of learning a new language. There’s a lot going on here, and they don’t yet have mastery experiences in anything where they’ve had to use all those skills simultaneously. In an intro coding class, it’s our job to help them build self efficacy in programming the same way that they have in other subjects that they’ve become proficient in.
Vicarious Experiences: Other people's past wins also give us faith in future wins.
Another factor that affects self efficacy is vicarious experiences. When you see someone else succeed, especially someone you relate to, it makes you think, ‘If they can do it, so can I.’ Maybe you haven’t gone through all those mastery experiences like we talked about yet, but if you see someone else do it, you see an example of it being possible. This is similar to the importance of role models. So it’s important to make sure that students have lots of positive examples of people who they relate to succeeding in learning to program; representation matters. This interacts with the concepts discussed in sense of belonging.
Verbal Persuasion: Others can help convince us that we can do it.
A third factor is verbal persuasion–which is basically encouragement. When teachers or peers encourage you, it boosts your belief in your abilities. As teaching staff, this is a huge part of our job. Simply be there through the process of them gaining mastery experiences and remind them that they can do it, that everyone can learn to program, that we believe in them. A lot of the time, that matters just as much as the content itself. If you see a student who seems to be checked out and really doesn’t think they can do it, it might be worthwhile to pause the conversation about whatever question you’re working on with them and just talk about their thoughts on the course overall. You can ask them questions like:
We’re really interested in knowing how this quarter’s version of the course is going. How is the course going for you?
It sounds like this assignment was really hard. What did you do to get started on it, and what was the hardest part of getting started?
The idea is to have a conversation that asks about their feelings and experiences in a non-judgmental way. Once you get them talking, they may say things that reveal how they feel about themselves and their self-efficacy. If they say things that suggest that they don’t think they have what it takes, remind them that everyone can learn how to program, and that everyone has to start somewhere. You can even give them stats about how many people didn’t have prior programming experience but succeeded in the course anyway. This is a great topic to chat about with other teaching staff–what kinds of things do you say to students who really don’t think that they can succeed?
Physiological and emotional states: Our body's stress response and our self efficacy are interdependent.
Finally, there are the physiological and emotional states we experience. People often interpret stress responses—like a racing heart, sweating, or feeling anxious—as signs that they're struggling. We associate those stress responses with times when we’re not doing well, so we’re less likely to expect success when we’re feeling that way. Cortisol and adrenaline make us feel like we’re in fight or flight mode, which is not ideal for trying to sit down and learn something new.
This influence can also happen in the other direction—a student who has low self efficacy could be more likely to become stressed in response to seeing a difficult question, which could lead to an even less self efficacy.
If you see that a student seems to be visibly stressed or anxious, you can encourage them to take a deep breath and take a break. And of course, be sure to talk to other members of the teaching staff and let us know if you think that a student might be in need of CAPS or other mental health resources.
Conclusion & Further Reading
There’s no one size fits all solution to building self efficacy, but hopefully this gives you some ideas of what to look for and think about as you work with students. Remind students that they’ve mastered difficult subjects in the past, and that they’ll be able to learn how to program too with enough practice. Emphasize that everyone can learn how to program. Make sure they know that we’re on their team and believe in them.
If you’re interested in reading more about self efficacy, here’s a paper to start with:
Academic self-efficacy: from educational theory to instructional practice - Anthony R Artino Jr