Editorial

‘Self-belief’ represents individuals’ evaluations of their personal attributes. It is an umbrella term that encompasses one’s distinct but nested evaluations of various components of one’s ‘self’, the components which differ in their breadth and focused areas, with self-concepts referring to as one’s evaluations of general ability in specific life domains (e.g. academic, social, physical) whereas self-efficacy as one’s evaluations of one’s skills to complete tasks. Self-efficacy thus refers to one’s confidence in successfully performing a task. It is now agreed upon that self-concept and self-efficacy should be understood (conceptualised, operationalised) in reference to more specific curricular subjects (e.g. mathematics, English) and to particular academic skills (e.g. converting fractions to decimals), respectively (Liem, McInerney, & Yeung, 2015). Considering the level of specificity of self-concept and self-efficacy holds important practical implications in that efforts seeking to promote these self-beliefs in students can be more targeted and, as a result, more effective.

The eight empirical papers in the present issue embody current theorising and methodological advances in the research area of self-belief in educational settings. Based on their analyses of the 2006 and 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) databases, Cheema and Skultety (2017) examined the relationships between American adolescents’ self-efficacy in mathematics and science and their actual performance in the two subjects, with a special substantive focus on ascertaining the degree to which these adolescents over or underestimate their true abilities. They found that, even after controlling for student and school-level differences, White students tended to underestimate their ability, whereas Black and Hispanic students seemed to overestimate it. Not only does this finding imply that empirical relationships between self-beliefs and achievement might be moderated by ethnicity, it further suggests that interventions to promote self-beliefs should be culturally adapted in their design and implementation.

Aligned with a recent call of studies to integrate self-determination and achievement goal models of motivation (Vansteenkiste, Lens, Elliot, Soenens, & Mouratidis, 2014), Bieg, Reindl, and Dresel (2017) explored reciprocal relationships between mastery goals and intrinsic motivation in a group of German psychology major students across four time points. Their cross-lagged structural equation modelling revealed that, although both constructs were intra-individually stable over time, prior mastery goals predicted subsequent intrinsic motivation but not vice versa. The relevance of emphasising mastery orientation in students’ educational trajectories also surfaces in another paper. In what appears to be among the first investigations on school transition self-efficacy, Madjar and Chohat (2017) showed the role of Israeli students’ perceptions of teachers’ emphasis on mastery goal orientations in their confidence to do what it takes to transition successfully from elementary to middle school. The social aspect of students’ transition self-efficacy in turn predicted changes in their emotional and behavioural engagement after the transition. Although the two studies were based on samples drawn from vastly diverse age and cultural groups, both Bieg et al.’s and Madjar and Chohat’s findings underscore the importance of promoting mastery goals to optimise effective learning and mastery classroom goal structures for adaptive school transitions to take place.

Underpinned by the expectancy-value theory of motivation, Wu and Fan (2017) studied the mediating effect of American college students’ academic procrastination in connecting their self-efficacy and subjective task value to effort and persistence. Whilst self-efficacy consistently had both direct and indirect effects on effort and persistence through delaying and missing deadlines – the two dimensions of academic procrastination, the effects of attainment and intrinsic values as well as perceived costs on the two behavioural engagement outcomes were less consistent, weaker, and typically mediated by missing deadlines. The finding affirms the relatively more adaptive and more generalised role of self-efficacy in effective learning.

In a longitudinal person-centred examination of Finnish children’s transition from kindergarten to Grade 2, Viljaranta et al. (2017) identified six profiles of children differing in their levels of reading skills, interest and self-concept. Interestingly, the temporal transitions between profile groups are characterised by changes in either reading interest or both reading self-concept and reading skills. This finding seems to show not only the close link between learners’ perceived and true competency but also the need to understand this link through the lens of domain specificity.

In a study that tested the incremental validity of self-efficacy with a group of medical students in Austria and Switzerland, Guntern, Korpershoek, and van der Werf (2017) examined the joint role of self-efficacy and self-discipline, emotional stability, and social activity – markers of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion, respectively, in predicting perceived performance. Self-efficacy was found to significantly predict perceived performance over and above personality characteristics and high-school grade point average. In view of the relatively more malleable nature of self-efficacy than personality traits, this finding leaves us with an optimistic note especially with regard to practices seeking to enhance self-efficacy.

In a somewhat different substantive focus from other educational research on self-efficacy, Fallah (2017) explored the role of coping self-efficacy in mediating the effect of mindfulness on foreign language anxiety among Iranian second language learners. The finding showed that the extent to which students were confident in their capacity in efficiently dealing with difficult and stressful situations was not only associated with lower anxiety but also strengthened the adaptive effect of mindfulness in reducing anxiety. Moving ahead, one of the next logical steps is to conduct research based on an experimental design to compare the effects of intervention programmes that promote mindfulness, coping self-efficacy, or both, on anxiety associated with learning foreign language or core academic subjects.

Taking a cultural perspective of self-regulated learning, Xu, Du, and Fan (2017) investigated time management in online groupwork among Chinese undergraduates. Their findings demonstrated that, beyond sociodemographic factors, Chinese students’ time management in online groupwork was determined by their learning-oriented reasons and preferences for feedback which, as the authors argued, may be rooted in the internationalisation of avoidance of uncertainty and value of education by the Chinese. The study illustrates the importance of taking into account culturally-rooted psychosocial factors associated with self-beliefs and taking the cultural perspective more seriously to better understand how self-beliefs develop and function.

Collectively, the eight papers in this issue have raised important educational implications that fostering self-beliefs has on student school motivation, engagement and achievement. The research field, and by implication educational policies and practices, can only benefit from the theoretical depth and methodological rigour of each of the empirical investigations reported here. I hope these papers, together with those in this journal’s previous special issue ‘Self-related Beliefs and Processes: Asian Insights’ (Chong & Liem, 2014), serve as a source of your inspiration and motivation to bring this area of research to a greater height. With great enthusiasm and optimistic anticipation, I look forward to the fruitful impact of these papers on other scholars’ future research endeavours.

Gregory Arief D. Liem
[email protected]