76 Geoscience Education II: Cognition and Learning in the Geosciences

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

SELF-EFFICACY ROCKS! A COMPARISON OF STUDENT AFFECT AND PERFORMANCE IN PHYSICAL GEOLOGY COURSES

Paper number: 76-13
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 11:00 AM – 11:15 AM

Authors

Abstract

The GARNET (Geoscience Affective Research Network) project examines the connection between student learning and the affective domain, which includes student motivations, values, attitudes and learning strategies. A key question is the influence of the affective domain on course grade. In 2008-2009, nine participating instructors at four institutions administered the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ; Pintrich et al., 1993) at the beginning and end of the course. A total of 326 students fully participated and consented to use of their data. We compared the students’ course grades to their MSLQ results and found that three of the MSLQ subscales were significantly correlated to students’ percentile rankings within their classes: Self-Efficacy (positive correlation), Time and Study Environment (positive correlation), and Rehearsal (negative correlation), with Self-Efficacy being the most important. All of these correlations held true for both pre-course and post-course MSLQ scores, although the correlations were stronger for the post-course scores.

In 2009-2010, we repeated the procedure with 14 instructors at seven institutions. The grade distributions were statistically identical for four of these instructors, so we focused on these instructors and used grade rather than percentile rank as our measure of student performance. A total of 351 of these instructors’ students completed both pre- and post-course surveys and consented to use of their data. We again found a strong correlation between Self-Efficacy and student grade. Other subscales showed significant but weaker correlations. On the pre-course survey, students’ scores on the Effort Regulation scale showed a positive correlation with their grades. On the post-course survey, students’ scores on the Intrinsic Goal Orientation scale and the Test Anxiety scale were negatively correlated with their course grades.

Students with high self-efficacy are confident that they can understand class material, do well on assignments and exams, and master the skills taught in the course. Instructors striving to improve student performance in introductory geology classes may wish to try to improve students’ self-efficacy.