Know what you do, do what you know

Something that stood out to me from the Pajares article was his discussion that without the right tools (teachers, equipment, etc.) no amount of self-efficacy can compensate for the lack of adequate resources required to perform academic tasks. Although self-efficacy may be greater than demonstrated performance, “it is not so much a matter that students do not know what to do but rather that they are unable to do what they know.” According to Bandura, self-efficacy cannot impact or predict academic performance if social constraints and scarcity of resources prohibit performance in the first place. This made me think about culturally relevant practices in the classroom and valuing different ways of knowing, specifically in regard to assessment of learning. How might schools be more equitable, and how might we positively impact performance for all if we were better able to let students “do what they know” and assess that? If we aren’t measuring for mastery, I don’t know how we could expect students to be learning for mastery. However, this brings me to my next point, which questions how much we really value mastery in this society and how the purpose of education might affect mastery-oriented learning. 

In pondering the purpose of education, I think we have to ask about the purpose of education for whom, and then we can weigh how mastery, self-efficacy, and self-regulation play a role in education. If you consider, for example, the role of education as something crafted and orchestrated by the government to produce good little worker bees, then mastery is probably a less prominent goal for the majority of students (and teachers for that matter). Freire’s idea of banking education would align with the notion that education molds students who are well suited for the labor market and workforce demands, so perhaps if that is the purpose of education then they’ve succeeded. To be marketable in the workforce, to what extent can we embrace education for mastery? Are we at a point where jobs are the ultimate assessment of an education well done? Employment that provides a livable wage is harder to come by, and there is an emphasis on being well qualified, which usually means performing well in school to get there. Our society is performance oriented. I don’t think, however, that this is necessarily at the exclusion of having self-efficacy and self-regulation. Again, we have to ask what we are gaining self-efficacy for and who education is for.