Academic self-efficacy and assessment

Educational Psychology is devoted serving as a platform for worldwide researchers with their important findings in psychological aspects of education. In this issue, the contributors have demonstrated great enthusiasm and contributed seven fine papers on optimising adolescents’ learning performance that consider psychological issues related to self-efficacy and well-being of students from diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. The theme running through this issue is Academic Self-efficacy and Assessment. These seven studies offer valuable insights on how learning and achievement are affected by Self-efficacy under the influence of family, social and psychological domains.

Self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997), self-regulation, self-concept and self-control are beliefs that students are capable to optimise their learning performance by their own psychological efforts in addition to support from families and teachers in educational settings.

According to Shim (2018), ‘To fully understand students’ learning and achievement, one must examine various contexts beyond the school setting’. Yang and Tu (2020) examined Chinese adolescents in homework management setting and found out that highly achieving students were more likely to arrange the environment, manage time, handle distraction, monitor motivation, and control negative emotion, and therefore to achieve better outcomes.

The work by Simpkins et al. (2019) investigated the relative importance of perceived support from home and school which may be necessary to sustain adolescents’ science motivational beliefs and their classroom engagement, with hope to lower the risk of dropping out of the underrepresented minority Latino students in the United States.

The same ‘perceived’ self-control depletion is also found in Lindner and Retelsdorf (2019) which indicated that ‘perceived’ conquers ‘manipulated’ self-control, and achieves better outcomes on English as a foreign language assessment in Germany.

Another factor to affect self-efficacy is ‘regulatory focus’, which consists of two basic orientations that guide goal-related behaviours – promotion focus and prevention focus (Higgins, 1997). Under this concept, Liu et al. (2019) shed light on the relationship between regulatory focus and learning engagement with Chinese adolescents, in which students with high promotion focus and low prevention focus showed higher academic self-efficacy and lower depression and, in turn, demonstrated greater learning engagement.

Phan et al. (2020) studied university students in Taiwan and also echoed the importance of self-efficacy to mediate the relationships among personal resolve, effective functioning and academic striving with significant evidence, overall, contributes best to the study of optimal achievement.

Zhou et al. (2020) investigated the correlation of teacher-student relationship in students’ mathematical problem solving ability through self-efficacy and maths anxiety in China.

The above last three papers are using self-efficacy as a mediating role in order to provide even more insightful information to explore further how self-efficacy functions in learning engagement and in consequence affects students’ academic achievement.

The work by Yan et al. (2019) on Hong Kong adolescents showed that attitude, subjective norms, self-efficacy, and perceived controllability were significant predictors on intention to self-assess, while self-efficacy and intention had significant influence on self-assessment practice. In this study, the Rasch analysis has done an excellent job to allow us to spot the complex relationship among numerous variables with a large scale sample in measurement and assessment in order to draw precise results and conclusions.

Self-efficacy has been the core of research interest for the past three decades in the field of educational psychology. How teachers could create a positive learning environment to nourish students’ psychological well-being in order to optimise their learning progress remains the holy grail in education. Furthermore, another interesting factor would be: is the difference of the East and the West also playing part in this relating topic of self-efficacy and assessment? That is, the eastern and the western cultural factor in the Expectancy-value theory, in the different definitions of hard working and feeling confident, in the different relationship and interaction between teachers and students, and how they define success and failure that affect the development of self-efficacy, etc. All these would be possible research directions for all of us to ponder upon in the future.

Before summarising, I would like to congratulate the authors to their accomplishment and contributions in the field of educational psychology. Also, my sincere gratitude goes to all the reviewers who generously shared their time and expertise to strengthen the articles in this issue. And my special thanks go to the editorial team, for their tireless efforts to work under the critical conditions of the current Coronavirus outbreak to make the publication of this issue possible on schedule. I also wish all the educators may find this issue useful to improvise ideas in their online courses and assessment to boost students’ self-efficacy to continue learning effectively at home if necessary. This powerful psychological effect may help numerous students achieving their learning outcomes with continuous education and life-long learning.

In summary, each of the above studies not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding about self-efficacy, assessment and related concepts, but they have also provided a springboard to further investigations. I am sure that you will appreciate the rigour and insightfulness of the works in this issue. Enjoy the good read!