*WINNER* The Role of Academic Self-Efficacy in Student Success

Abstract

This won best undergraduate poster in Counseling and Psychology.

Self-efficacy, the extent of an individual’s belief of one’s own confidence in performing tasks, solving problems, and initiating social contact, plays a fundamental role in an individual’s academic performance. For first year college students academic self-efficacy is especially important for goal orientation and student success. Self-efficacy is a good predictor of obstacles, problems, or failures that may influence academic success in college. Perceived academic self-efficacy among college students in this study was analyzed in an attempt to understand student performance.
An online questionnaire of undergraduate students resulted in 140 completed surveys with 74 first year students (52.1%) and 85 females (59.9%) with an average age of 19.21 (SD = 2.31). Certain factors for the participants such as stress, gender, level of education, level of commitment to current major, and their absolute value judgement of their individual performance at the university were tested as predictors of academic self-efficacy. It was found that their commitment to their major was significantly correlated with levels of academic self-efficacy [r(138)= .279, p= .001 ] and with their absolute judgement of their academic performance [r(138)= .344, p= .001]. Self-efficacy was related to commitment to major and absolute judgment of performance, but unrelated to the judgement of performance relative to peers, which will be discussed during the presentation.