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As a practical matter, creating a genuine history of success is most convincing if teachers also work to broaden a student’s vision of “thepast.” Younger students (elementary-age) in particular have relatively short or limited ideas of what counts as “past experience;” theymay go back only a few occasions when forming impressions of whether they cansucceed again in the future (Eccles, et al., 1998). Older students (secondary school) gradually develop longer views of their personal “pasts,”both because of improvements in memory and because of accumulating a personal history that is truly longer. The challenge for working with any age, however,is to ensure that students base self-efficacy beliefs on all relevant experiences from their pasts, not just on selected or recent experiences.

Watching others’ experiences of mastery

A second source of efficacy beliefs comes from vicarious experience of mastery, or observing others’ successes (Schunk&Zimmerman, 1997). Simply seeing someone else succeed at a task, in other words, can contribute tobelieving that you, too, can succeed. The effect is stronger when the observer lacks experience with the task and therefore may be unsure of his or her ownability. It is also stronger when the model is someone respected by the observer, such as a student’s teacher, or a peer with generallycomparable ability. Even under these conditions, though, vicarious experience is not as influential as direct experience. The reasons are not hard toimagine.

Suppose, for example, you witness both your teacher and a respected friend succeed at singing a favorite tune, but you are unsure whether you personallycan sing. In that case you may feel encouraged about your own potential, but are likely still to feel somewhat uncertain of your own efficacy. If on theother hand you do not witness others’ singing, but you have a history of singing well yourself, it is a different story. In that case you are likely to believe in yourefficacy, regardless of how others perform.

All of which suggests that to a modest extent, teachers may be able to enhance students’ self-efficacy by modeling success at a task or by pointing outclassmates who are successful. These strategies can work because they not only show how to do a task, but also communicate a more fundamental message, thefact that the task can in fact be done. If students are learning a difficult arithmetic procedure, for example, you can help by demonstrating the procedure, or by pointing outclassmates who are doing it. Note, though, that vicarious mastery is helpful only if backed up with real successes performed by the students themselves. Itis also helpful only if the “model classmates” are perceived as truly comparable in ability. Overuse of vicarious models, especially in theabsence of real success by learners, can cause learners to disqualify a model’s success; students may simply decide that the model is “outof their league” in skills and is therefore irrelevant to judging their own potential.

Expectancy-value theory

By now, it should be clear that motivation is affected by several factors, including reinforcement for behavior, but especially also students’ goals,interests, and sense of self-efficacy. The factors combine to create two general sources of motivation: students’ expectation of success and thevalue that students place on a goal. Viewing motivation in this way is often called the expectancy-value model of motivation (Wigfield&Eccles, 2002; Wigfield, Tonk,&Eccles, 2004), and sometimes written with a multiplicative formula: expectancy x value = motivation. The relationshipbetween expectation and value is “multiplicative” rather than additive because in order to be motivated, it is necessary for a person to haveat least a modest expectation of success and to assign a task at least some positive value. If you have high expectations of success but do not value atask at all (mentally assign it a “0” value), then you will not feel motivated at all. Likewise, if you value a task highly but have noexpectation of success about completing it (assign it a “0” expectancy), then you also will not feel motivated at all. Dr. Eccles explainsExpectancy-Value theory in the classroom in this brief article .

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Source:  OpenStax, Oneonta epsy 275. OpenStax CNX. Jun 11, 2013 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11446/1.6
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