International Webinar 2023 - Visiting Lecture with Lecturer from Hlukhiv National Pedagogical University (Ukraine) – Part 5

In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their ability to act in the way necessary to achieve a certain goal. The concept was originally proposed by psychologist Albert Bandura.


Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds about their power to influence situations, self-efficacy greatly influences both the power a person has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make. This effect is particularly clear, and interesting, with respect to investment behavior such as in health, education, and agriculture.


A strong sense of self-efficacy drives human achievement and personal well-being. Someone with high self-efficacy sees challenges as things to be mastered rather than threats to be avoided. These people can recover from failure more quickly and are more likely to attribute failure to a lack of effort. They approach threatening situations believing they can control them. These things have been linked to lower stress levels and a lower susceptibility to depression.


In contrast, people with low self-efficacy perceive difficult tasks as personal threats and avoid them. Difficult tasks lead them to look at the skills they have rather than the skills they have. It is easy for them to lose faith in their own abilities after experiencing failure. Low self-efficacy can be associated with higher levels of stress and depression.


For low achieving students, self-efficacy is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. Excessive efficacy or 'illusory' efficacy hinders critical examination of one's practice, thereby hindering professional learning. One study, involving 101 lower division Portuguese students at U.T. Austin, examines foreign students' beliefs about learning, achieving goals, and motivation to continue learning a language. It was concluded that excessive efficacy affected students' motivation negatively, so that students who believed they were "good at languages" had lower motivation to learn.


Self-efficacy has proven to be very useful for helping undergraduate students gain insight into their career development in the STEM field. Researchers have reported that mathematics self-efficacy is more predictive of mathematics interest, choice of mathematics-related subjects, and mathematics major than past achievement in mathematics or outcome expectations.


Self-efficacy theory has been applied to career areas to examine why women are underrepresented in male-dominated STEM fields such as math, engineering, and science. It was found that gender differences in self-efficacy expectations significantly influence career-related behaviors and career choices of young women.


Technical self-efficacy was found to be an important factor for teaching computer programming to school students, as students with higher levels of technological self-efficacy achieved higher learning outcomes. The technical self-efficacy effect was found to be stronger than the gender effect.


The above material was delivered by a presenter from Ukraine in a visiting lecturer held by STEKOM University in collaboration with Universities from Ukraine. The title of the presentation is "Learning Skills in 21st Century Education and Work Environment".


This international webinar activity is part of the implementation of STEKOM University's commitment to increase various international activities. This was done in order to realize the vision to become an international-class university. Various international activities carried out by STEKOM University continue from year to year. There are international activities that are sustainable and there are also some international activities that are not sustainable. All types of international activities are accommodated and regulated by the International department of STEKOM University.