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"Self-Efficacy" I had to look that up.
It's basically self confidence.
Not quite. It certainly inspires it, but it's more like seeing and knowing you can do something - as opposed to just beliving that you could if you wanted to or tried really hard.
Psychologically this distinction is kinda important, because doing something lowers the mental burden of doing it again. If you are very self confident you are more eager to try stuff, but you may still fail and never touch it again. That is precisely because you didn't get to experience that self-efficacy, or even worse: failure (which is kind of anti-self-efficacy).
So this study says that if you have already successfully done something before that you will be better at doing it again?
I think the important bit here is that solving any math problem makes you 'less afraid' of math and more likely to seriously engage new problems.
I think it makes a ton of sense that this improves grades in college/university, because people tend to procrastinate when facing something that seems difficult and scary. If they were less reluctant to give it serious thought, they would have much more time to study
Thanks. I wasn't confident enough in my spelling to look it up.
Yeah that whole abstract could have just said: Students who learned math in high school are more confident when they take the same math classes later in college.
I tested out of the basic math programs that our liberal arts college required for first year students on the first day. We were allowed to use our Ti-82s and any formulas stored on them. This was nearly 30 years ago however.
In other words if you've done it before it'll be easier? Wow much science
You lacked self-efficacy in spelling, which hinders your performance in subjects involving English words.
~~Interesting. I know in the abstract they specifically say this cannot be generalized outside of mathematics, but I'd be curious to see if there's a similar phenomenon in other subjects.~~
~~Some of my classmates, in various subjects from grade school all the way through my master's degree, would struggle in certain topics and claim that they simply couldn't do it rather than keep trying until they succeeded. I wonder how many of those scenarios were self-fulfilling prophecies based in their lack of confidence in their ability to learn novel information.~~
Misread the whole damn abstract. They said that findings from other fields couldn't necessarily be extended to math/science due to the task-specificity, not that the findings couldn't be extended to other fields.
That diagram is making me stupider.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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