Self-efficacy and prior performance

Earlier this week in one of my classes, a peer shared a story about how she loved math throughout high school, was invigorated by the challenge of a complex problem, and saw herself as someone who would pursue a career in STEM. Her senior year, however, she took a difficult calculus class and suddenly her feelings toward math changed dramatically, so much so that she never took another math class again and stayed as far from STEM as she could. This led me to spend a lot of time thinking about why one negative experience can have such a profound impact, despite a collection of previous positive experiences. Bandura provided some insight for me, but I was struggling with aspects of his ideas about how prior performance impacts efficacy judgments for future performance. For example, in The Explanatory and Predictive Scope of Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986), he states that our efficacy judgments “are not simply reflective imprints of past action or performance feedback” but he also says that we integrate new experiences into our pre-existing self-efficacy. Those statements feel contradictory, since our pre-existing self-efficacy is entwined with our prior experiences. How does this help explain situations like the one described above? How is perseverance so easily affected by negative experiences, but seemingly not as much so by positive ones?

As I was reading his 2003 article, Negative Self-efficacy and Goal Effects Revisited, Bandura helped me think about this differently when he discussed the malleability of self-efficacy via normative comparisons. He stated that allegedly (emphasis added) moving from a high to low normative standing caused perceived self-efficacy to override past performance as a predictor of future performance. I found this fascinating; as intelligent as we might be and despite our prior successes, we are so easily swayed by social comparisons. In the story I described above, this peer had also shared that she was one of just a few females in her calculus class, and during independent seatwork and tests the males finished their work more quickly, which led her to doubt her own intelligence in math. Although the context of this discussion was regarding stereotype threat and not self-efficacy specifically, I felt that the articles I read from Bandura this week helped me understand why one negative experience can overshadow so many positive ones, which has important implications for classroom settings. Not everything we do is norm referenced though, so what about situations when assessments of our performance are not based on normative comparisons?