Uppeldi og menntun - 01.07.2012, Page 137

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 21(2) 2012 137
gUðrún alda HarðardÓttir og kriStJÁn kriStJÁnSSon
that self-efficacy is cultivated through (a) enactive mastery experiences, (b) vicarious
experiences provided by relevant role models, (c) verbal persuasion and allied types
of social influences and (d) intermittent or stable physiological and affective states.
This theory falls into the category of so-called anti-realist self-theories (which equate
selfhood with self-concept) and its best understood as a variety of psychological attri-
butionism, according to which people tend to act in accordance with the explanations
they like to give for their own behaviour and with the attributes they believe they
possess, whether or not they actually possess them.
Perceived self-efficacy is typically measured by dint of self-reports where people are
asked to grade their own self-efficacy in a given domain. Such measures are obviously
not applicable to preschoolers due to their less advanced level of linguistic competency.
The paper explores some methodological avenues to overcome this shortcoming and
concludes that the method of “pedagogical documentation” may hold a key to its
solution. A core section in the paper exemplifies the use of such a method to decipher
self-efficacy (or lack thereof) in preschoolers, by applying it to an analysis of data from
the first author’s current doctoral study of life and work in a single preschool over a
single school year. The analysis seems to indicate that reading self-efficacy (or lack
thereof) out of the data is feasible, although no further attempt is made here to opera-
tionalise it for use in traditional correlational research à la Bandura (on presumed con-
nections between perceived self-efficacy and various other psychological and social
variables).
The article then takes a meta-methodological turn. By using insights from a classic
work by Nisbett and Ross on human beings’ affective ignorance and lack of selftrans-
parency – and hence the inadequacies of self-report measurements – the conclusion
is reached that traditional measures of perceived self-efficacy do not necessarily cap-
ture people’s actual perceived self-efficacy but rather their beliefs about what that
perceived self-efficacy is likely to be when it comes to the crunch of actually being
faced with a relevant task. The earlier discussion about the possibility of developing
a pedagogic-documentation-inspired measure of preschoolers’ self-efficacy may thus
have wider implications than earlier anticipated for self-efficacy research in general.
More specifically, if it is advisable, as Nisbett and Ross maintain, to try to find more
objective measures even of subjective variables (such as self-efficacy) than typical
selfreport instruments, then an objective method based on pedagogical documenta-
tion may pave the way to more accurate studies of self-efficacy in general – not only
children’s self-efficacy – and hence enhance the methodological viability and concep-
tual reliability of Bandura’s theory.
Keywords: Perceived self-efficacy, self-measurements, Bandura, methodology, pre-
schools