Journal article
Changes in students’ self-efficacy when learning a new topic in mathematics: a micro-longitudinal study
- Abstract:
- Self-efficacy in mathematics is related to engagement, persistence, and academic performance. Prior research focused mostly on examining changes to students’ self-efficacy across large time intervals (months or years), and paid less attention to changes at the level of lesson sequences. Knowledge of how self-efficacy changes during a sequence of lessons is important as it can help teachers better support students’ self-efficacy in their everyday work. In this paper, we expanded previous studies by investigating changes in students’ self-efficacy across a sequence of 3-4 lessons when students were learning a new topic in mathematics (nStudents = 170, nTime-points = 596). Nine classes of Norwegian grade 6 (n = 77) and grade 10 students (n = 93) reported their self-efficacy for easy, medium difficulty, and hard tasks. Using multilevel models for change, we found: (a) change of students’ self-efficacy across lesson sequences; (b) differences in the starting-point and change of students’ self-efficacy according to perceived task difficulty and grade; (c) more individual variation of self-efficacy starting-point and change in association with harder tasks; and (d) students in classes who were taught a new topic in geometry had stronger self-efficacy at the beginning of the first lesson as compared to those who were taught a new topic in algebra (grade 10), and students in classes who were taught a new topic in fractions had steeper growth across the lesson sequence as compared to those who were taught a new topic in measurement (grade 6). Implications for both research and practice on how new mathematics topics are introduced to students are discussed.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.2MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10649-022-10165-1
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Educational Studies in Mathematics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 111
- Pages:
- 515–541
- Publication date:
- 2022-07-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-30
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0816
- ISSN:
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0013-1954
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1261748
- Local pid:
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pubs:1261748
- Deposit date:
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2022-05-31
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Street et al
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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