Secondary School Students’ Chemistry Self-Efficacy: Its Importance, Measurement, and Sources - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 189

Secondary School Students ' Chemistry
Self-Efficacy: Its Importance, Measurement,
and Sources

Derek Cheung

Abstract Self-efficacy for learning chemistry refers to one s beliefs about his or

her ability to successfully perform specific tasks in chemistry. For students to be
successful in school chemistry, they need to have a positive sense of self-efficacy.
Research has repeatedly indicated that individual students

'

levels of self-efficacy
affect the effort they spend on an activity, the persistence they put forth when
confronting obstacles, the resilience they show in the face of adverse situations, the
level of academic achievement they attain, and the enrolment choices they make.
Students construct their self-efficacy beliefs from four major sources of informa-
tion: performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and
physiological and emotional states. Although chemistry education researchers have
developed several questionnaires to measure students

'

perceived self-efficacy, most
of them are not specific enough to measure chemistry self-efficacy. Researchers
have paid even less attention to investigating how classroom chemistry teaching
contributes to the development of students

'

chemistry self-efficacy. This chapter
provides an extensive review of the literature on chemistry self-efficacy, reports
recent research on chemistry self-efficacy conducted in Hong Kong secondary
schools, and offers some directions for future research on chemistry self-efficacy.

'

1 Introduction

There are many different affective variables influencing student learning in schools,
such as attitudes, values, self-esteem, locus of control, self-efficacy, interest,
aspirations, and anxiety (Anderson & Bourke, 2000 ). They differ in their target,
direction, intensity, and level of specificity of measurement (Anderson & Bourke,
2000 ; Bandura, 1997 ; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000 ). At both the secondary and tertiary
levels of study, students generally engage in certain learning tasks but try to avoid
others. Why do students exhibit this kind of behavior? Bandura ( 1977 , 1982 ) made