by Yilin Xu
for Social Psychology
Mary, a first year graduate student, is struggling with her study life. She feels that graduate school has much more work than undergraduate, and also the work is more difficult than undergraduate. She is confused about how to adapt herself to such a quick learning rhythm and difficult environment.
I will help Mary understand the objective impact of psychology, especially self-efficacy, on learning process based on three studies. According to the definition of Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations” (Bandura). The level of self-efficacy will greatly affect academic success. The first study, Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College, is about the relationship between academic self-efficacy, grades, persistence, and their mutual influence on each other. The result of the study explains the complex relationship clearly.
There were four main questions that the study was concerned about. First was the relationship between academic self-efficacy and stress, and the researchers assumed that there was a negative correlation between them. Second, the study explored the relationship between grades, credits, and persistence. The researchers hypothesized that these factors positively related to one another. Third, the researchers wanted to reveal the effects of self-efficacy and stress on these academic outcomes. Finally, the researchers discussed the effect of demographic factors on academic success and persistence.
Based on these assumptions and questions, 107 freshmen from 1997 to 1998 were selected as experimental samples. Then, they were asked to complete a questionnaire, which included basic information, such as age, sex, high school GPA, racial/ethnic identification, language most often spoken at home, and a scale of self-efficacy and stress, which students can see their score. For the realness of data, they invented a new measuring scale themselves. According to the collected data, the relationship between academic self-efficacy, grades, and persistence was more clear. First, there is a real correlation between stress and self-efficacy. The results meant that individuals with high self-efficacy will work harder when they feel that there is a gap between their performance and their goals, while those with low self-efficacy will reduce effort, and even give up. Next, based on the data of full-time students and part-time students, the researchers knew that full-time students earned higher grades than part-time students, which could be explained by finding that the grades are positively related to persistence. Furthermore, the most important result was that academic self-efficacy had a strong positive effect on freshman grades and credits, but had less effect on sophomore year students. Besides, there was also an unexpected result that stress positively affected grades.
By explaining this research to Mary, she will understand that self-efficacy has a great impact on learning and self-control of stress. There is another study, Investigating the Relationship between Educational Stress and Emotional Self-Efficacy, which also proved that high emotional self-efficacy decreases educational stress.
The sample of this study were 232 students in secondary school, and there were 111 (48%) female students and 121 (52%) male students. The researchers used convenience sampling method and the Turkish version of Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale, which has coefficient of ESES as .92, as the tool to analyze the students’ self-efficacy. The result showed that emotional self-efficacy is positively associated with self-efficacy, psychological well-being, and happiness. It also contributes to conflict resolution and problem solving abilities. Furthermore, the researcher knew that females have more concern and stress from studying than males. Self-efficacy contributes to life satisfaction, school achievement, positive thinking, one’s belief about social competence, and emotion regulation ability.
If Mary can improve her sense of self-efficacy, the stress in her mind will naturally decrease, and she will be more confident as well. While talking about the stress and self-efficacy, I also want to talk about perceived control, which is another important influencing factor. Perceived control is a key construct in theories regarding the effects of stress and trauma. In my opinion, most of Mary’s stresses come from her feeling out of control of her current learning, which can also be explained by one result in the third study, “Event Controllability Moderates the Relation Between Perceived Control and Adjustment to Stressors”. They state that:
“Specifically, when individuals have experienced a stressful event, they can focus on whether they had control over the occurrence of the event (past control), what they currently have control over with regard to the event (present control), or the extent to which they have control over whether the event will happen again (future control)” (Frazier).
In this study, the researchers collected 637 students from a large midwestern university, and asked them to complete online surveys in exchange for extra credit in their psychology classes. The majority (73%) of the sample identified as female, 26% identified as male. They used two ways to analyze the data, one was identified each event into four point scale of control, the other one used the official Perceived Control over Stressful Events Scale. From the data they collected, the researchers noticed that there were a lot of people struggling about pain from their past. The researcher proved in the article that: “the present control is consistently related to better adjustment” (Frazier). Like Mary's case, if she overindulges in the excellent results she achieved during her undergraduate years and keeps feeling blindingly sad about her graduate study, she will never make progress. We need to focus more on the present. Just like the researchers’ suggestions in the article that “it may be more helpful to focus on present aspects of stressors that they can control (e.g., how they think about the event, how they are coping with it) rather than on what they could have controlled in the past or how they may attempt to control the future” (Frazier).
I also want to analyze Mary’s case from another aspect. I want to tell Mary that the difference between undergraduate and graduate is objective, and it is not all about the problem of her personal abilities or learning methods.
Undergraduate education is quality education, and it doesn’t focus on what major you are interested in, but pays attention to cultivating and helping students change from teenagers to adults. Graduate education is totally different; it is professional education. Compared with undergraduate training, graduate training mainly focuses on learning and doing research. Students determine the direction of learning and research independently, tutors only give guidance on the general idea of research, and the purpose of training is scientific research-oriented talents. During the graduate period, students have to complete a certain number of papers, and some of the papers must be published in professional journals. To a greater extent, these papers play a role in the process and procedure of training. If they don’t complete the papers then they will not be qualified for graduation. There was a data collection from the article “How Many People Actually Finish Grad School?” We can see from the data that the four year completion rates for a master’s degree is only 86%. There are a lot of students who face the same problems and situations as Mary. I want to show the real data to her, so that she can release part of her stress, and be more confident for her future.
After analyzing the actual situation and data, what she should do now is what she most urgently wants to know. According to the second study, There are different types of self-efficacy, and for Mary’s case, we need to focus on academic self-efficacy, which means students’ confidence in their ability to carry out such academic tasks such as preparing for exams and writing term papers. All of these are the main pressures for Mary. So, how can we improve her self-efficacy? We can improve the sense of self-efficacy from our own successful experiences. If Mary’s school is a very famous school, that can prove that she is capable enough to enter such a good school, so she should not doubt herself, but study harder. Or, we can get advice from experienced students, because many of the people's expectations of effectiveness come from observing other people's experience. Being understood and empathizing with others helps people increase their self-confidence. To some extent, how confident a person is in how he or she handles things will affect whether it is an opportunity, a challenge, or a difficulty. So, for Mary, it is very important to make her active and confident.
Sometimes it's not enough to rely solely on one's own strength. People around Mary should give her encouragement at the right time. For example, her parents and teachers should do something to increase her emotional self-efficacy levels, and create opportunities for her to support her development. In this regard, supportive and democratic parental attitudes instead of a rejectionist one, are important in terms of solving adolescent problems. For the school, empathy is another concept which affects emotional self-efficacy and life satisfaction. Thus, the school can hold group guidance, class guidance, and family education activities to increase students’ empathy skills.
From all of the studies, we learned that high self-efficacy indeed helps us to have a relaxed learning attitude when we have a good result; higher self-efficacy helps us be more confident; we should pay more attention to the present rather than keep struggling for the past or the future uselessly. For Mary, my suggestions are as follows: she can either think about her advantages or ask help from experienced classmates. She can also set small goals first, and her confidence will be increased when she completes each of the goals, and she will win the final victory. For the people around Mary, I advise them to watch her mood at any time, and give her enough encouragement and confidence. Communication is important all the time.
Work cited
“Self-Efficacy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy.
Pennington, Molly. “Noodle.” Noodle, Molly Pennington, www.noodle.com/articles/how-many-people-actually-finish-grad-school.
Zajacova, Anna, et al. SELF-EFFICACY, STRESS, AND ACADEMIC SUCCESS IN COLLEGE. Sept. 2005,
Arslan, Nihan. Investigating the Relationship between Educational Stress ...2017, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1155536.pdf.
FRAZIER, PATRICIA, and JACQUELINE CASTON. “Journal of Loss and Trauma.” Taylor and Francis Online, 2015, www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15325024.2014.949161.