76 Geoscience Education II: Cognition and Learning in the Geosciences

Monday, 1 November 2010
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 203

THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD – LESS PRIOR KNOWLEDGE BUT HIGH SELF-EFFICACY IS EQUIVALENT TO GREATER PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND LOW SELF-EFFICACY

Paper number: 76-14
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 11:15 AM – 11:30 AM

Authors

Abstract

Does a student entering a geology course at a specific ability level (on the basis of past performance and prior knowledge) but greater confidence in their capability to be successful, end up with a higher score in class than a student who has similar ability but lower initial self-confidence? We analyzed survey results from students in introductory physical geology classes in regard to prior knowledge, records of student success, self-efficacy, and performance (grade). Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that regardless of ability, the students who entered the class with higher self-efficacy (belief in their ability to be successful in the course) would earn higher grades than those with low self-efficacy.

We administered pre- and post-course Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaires (MSLQ; Pintrich et al, 1993) in introductory geology classes taught by 14 instructors at seven colleges and universities as part of a larger study of student affect (GARNET). We compared the MSLQ scores for more than 800 students to final class scores. Self-efficacy was measured by one of 15 subscales that make up the MSLQ. A step-wise multiple regression of matched pairs of student responses reveals that student performance is most strongly correlated with their score on the self-efficacy subscale on this larger database.

One could argue that high self-efficacy may simply reflect a student’s previous knowledge. In an effort to determine whether our data merely showed that more capable students do better than less capable students, we analyzed data from groups of students with similar prior knowledge. Students in this mini-study were almost exclusively freshmen who were members of two 95-person classes at a large public university in the Southeastern U.S. Student aptitude was measured on the basis of their GPA scores, and their results on a standard entry exam (GCI) and students were divided into groups of high (upper quartile), medium, and low (lower quartile) scores. We further divided these groups on the basis of self-efficacy. In individual aptitude groups, the high self-efficacy students earned higher grades than students with low self-efficacy scores. Further, students with low GCI or GPA scores but high self-efficacy earned the same grade as students with high GCI or GPA scores and low self-efficacy.