How efficacy expectancies should be assessed in classrooms?

What drives our behavior? What determines our decisions? To what extend our behavior is malleable? These are questions that researchers from different fields have tried to answer. From psychology, Bandura expanded the proposal of operant learning. On the one hand, the author proposed that the individual plays an active role mediating the association between her behavior and its consequence. She processed, weights, and integrates information about her capability. On the other hand, Bandura suggested that we have a sense of capacity to successfully execute the behavior that produce an expected outcome (efficacy expectancy). The efficacy expectancy affects the initiation and persistence of our coping behaviors, and it is built upon (mainly) on one’s experiences. Thus, as we discussed in class, this theory might advocate the idea that pedagogical strategies and interventions should be flexible so that they can be adapted to each student’s needs and preferences. As result, students’ efficacy expectancy is strengthened, and they engage more in their academic activities.  However, when I think about this idea, I wonder how we should start to create such learning environment. My first thought is that the first task for teachers (or practitioners who work with students) is to learn about their students’ self-efficacy. But I wonder what specifically they need to know: its level of magnitude? Its level of generality? Or its level of strength? In this line, I also would like to discuss to what extent this information is accessible. Is it something that can be reported by the person? In the case of phobias, it is (to some extent) easy to report the threatening objects (e.g., snakes), but in the case of students’ learning in classroom settings what should be reported?