Thinking about success

I think about the reason why so many scholars would spend so much effort building theoretical models of learning, figuring out pedagogical strategies, improving efficient learning methods and to help student succeed. However, what makes me puzzled is how we define success. More specifically, in schooling context, success could be broadly described as academic achievement, self-report mentally heathy and ability enhancement with in a certain period. It made me ponder about where does the progress come from. Success makes researchers so excited thus they are crazy finding the overarching principle behind it which could be suitable for every condition. But is success the prospect that individual could approach towards end in view set by himself/herself? There is no shortcut to achieve success but the accumulation of experience.

In one class of this week, we were asked to organize a model presenting the relationship or interplay between engagement (behavioral, emotional, cognitive, agentic), interest, achievement and self-regulated learning. We agreed most part of the connections between these notions, such as various engagement have interactions with each other and share mutual transformation, student's self-regulated learning could lead to success. However, when we were asked to put self-efficacy inside the present model, I hesitated because I could not see the inner logic between these models anymore. From personal perspective, they stands for different ideology but not a mode without any background.

Another thing is about the personal experience that I set in class last week, which was mainly about appearance of the unconscious "laying back" behavior and fear of speaking in public. No need to explain more about the journey of getting over it. But I think that being misunderstood is the foreordination of every expresser, since different individuals interprets the same language symbols so variously or even discrepantly. That's the reason why we need to continue communicating and listening (Trying to succeed in exchanging and fusing opinions, beliefs, thoughts could help us cherish self-efficacy). Even though in some cases, the beliefs or philosophy of mind essentially vary  from each other so distinctly. We still could communicate and exchange our thoughts.

Let's not read this one in class

I guess an apology is in order for the “vibe” of last week’s class? I thought we were engaged in some lively academic debate about the strengths and weaknesses of self-efficacy and expectancy-value theory, but apparently that’s not how it was interpreted. And I guess my point got lost in the debate, but anyone who interpreted my argument as “Value is all that matters and self-efficacy doesn’t” clearly wasn’t paying attention, especially to the part where I wrote in my original blog that started all of this, “I lean towards motivational theories like Expectancy-Value theory, which take all the good parts about self-efficacy and add in that value piece as an explainer of human motivation and behavior” [emphasis added]. Obviously self-efficacy matters, I’d have to be an idiot to enroll in an elective about a topic that I don’t believe in.

Further, I’m confused by exactly who is “living under a rock.” Would it be the person who adamantly says one construct explains everything about human motivation, or the person who is saying “hey, maybe other stuff is important too.” And as far as the “little box” that I seemingly find myself in, I would say that my opinions are based on 3+ years of doctoral studies, after being exposed to  multiple classes on student learning and education; I’m pretty happy where I currently sit in terms of beliefs about the strengths and weaknesses of the vast number of theories floating around in the educational psychology literature.

But I digress, I no longer value trying to explain the merits of a theory that has been extensively-studied and whose findings have been replicated in some of the most prestigious journals, not just in educational psychology, or even psychology, but in all of science, Science (http://curry.virginia.edu/uploads/resourceLibrary/Hulleman.Harackiewicz.Science.2009.promoting.relevance.pdf). And I definitely don’t still find it necessary to demonstrate the “absurd” scenario Michael presented last class is actually based in reality and has been explained in terms of how males and females have differential self-efficacy and task-values (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843492/pdf/nihms518068.pdf). Either way, I don’t blame you all though, you’ll probably never figure out the power of value until you do a class on Motivation.

Stress Management and Dunning Kruger Effect

I was reading Bandura’s article, “Negative Self-Efficacy and Goal Effects Revisited” 2003, and am contemplating the role of perceived personal control in stress and anxiety. The management of stressors and taxing environmental demands is important in a learning environment. According to Bandura, self-efficacy enhancement surpassed relaxation and sedation drugs in reducing self-rated anxiety as well as anxiety reactions and behavioral agitation during surgery. The more a person's efficacy beliefs are raised by preparatory treatments, the lower the anxious agitation.  While I have found that there is a significant impact of perceived ability to exercise control on stress and anxiety in my own life, I am learning how to encourage my children to exercise control on their own stress and anxiety.  I wonder if I could use the results of Bandura’s experiment with agoraphobics.  When they were led to believe, they were exercising control over the amount of CO2 they were inhaling, they remained unperturbed and free of catastrophic thinking and relatively few experienced panic attacks.  As an educator, if I want to help a student to decrease stress and anxiety, HOW could I create a situation which would lead the student to believe they are in control? 

An additional comment in the article: “A resilient sense of efficacy provides the necessary staying power in the arduous pursuit of innovation and excellence.” I thought of famous inventors such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison… and all the individuals who appear in Goalcast videos that pop up on in my social media, delivering motivational, inspirational quotes. What type of personal experiences motivated men such as Michael Jordan and Abraham Lincoln, to repeatedly “get up again” after numerous defeats, and helped them keep their eye on a longer-term, end goal?  Conversely, Bandura discusses the need to better understand the cost of insecurity and self-doubt in innovativeness, creativity, and personal and social change. I would enjoy further investigation of the functional value of a strong self-efficacy in opposition to the self-handicapping costs of distressing self-doubts about one’s abilities. 

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During Thursday’s class, we briefly discussed the Dunning Kruger Effect, a form of cognitive bias produced by overestimating one’s abilities.  We would say they are experiencing an illusionary superiority. Unfortunately, when we compare ourselves to others, we risk inaccurate judgment of our own abilities. I was considering a classroom full of students, with varying levels of math efficacy; specifically, considering students with lower math skill, who overestimate their abilities, working alongside students with higher math abilities.  The “expert” math students would presumably have higher efficacy and perhaps not perceive difficulty with a given the math assignment.  If the “experts” were grouped with the “novice” students (lower skill level), I would imagine that the novice math students might compare their work with their peers, and quickly lose efficacy in their abilities… or would they?  According to the Dunning Kruger Effect, the lower skilled students would continue to have false efficacy in their abilities and lack the expertise to recognize their poor performance. When students compare themselves to other students, they risk inaccurate judgment of their own abilities. As we have discussed in class, a comparison will happen, and it begins at an early age. When educators group students heterogeneously (high and low ability students working together), do we risk damaging efficacy in the lower ability students? Or are we helping the lower ability students by giving them a “reality check” on their actual abilities?  

When researching the Dunning Kruger Effect, I found several suggestions for avoiding personal deception, including, 1. Reject the use of peer comparison; only compare yourself against your personal, previous performance. 2. Evaluate your own specific abilities, instead of evaluating general abilities.  3. Seek mentors for feedback and as a resource to accelerate your learning. I suggest a practical application for the classroom would be to encourage each student to avoid peer comparison, teach them to set attainable personal goals, and remind them to focus on personal growth throughout the school year. Does anyone have thoughts/suggestions for helping students accurately evaluate their own abilities?  Accurate self-evaluation is important for educators as well. How might an administration help educators accurately assess their teaching abilities?  

“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we know about life, ourselves and the world around us.”     -Socrates

Where does belief come from and how to change it?

I wish to know how to transform people's belief for a very long time since I couldn't understand some decisions and behaviors of my mom，such as she would insist on washing every plastic bag in my dormitory. I questioned a lot why she couldn't stand in other people's shoes. But I started to understand her when one of my friends told me that if I experienced what my mom's experiences, I would probably also act in the same way. Then I realized that to some extent, it is me who could not stand in her shoes also. This let me rethink that the relationship between experiences, beliefs, and self-reflection. From self-efficacy, I could see that value and belief come from external experiences to a large extent, just like the stimulations in behaviorism. But in social cognitive perspective, people have a chance to self-reflect on their own behaviors and make some changes so as to better adapt into the environment, which makes humans distinguish from lots of animals. But the question is where does the reflection come from and why people build the willingness to change it?

Reflecting back to Loretta's kid who refuses to do math homework willingly, it might have many reasons in this scenario. To solve this problem, the first thing might be to figure out what kinds of belief that the kid holds as well as the underlying reasons. Let's imagine that the reason is due to the lack of successful experiences. Based on self-efficacy theory, it might need other people, such as parents and teachers, to create a successful environment for him. But is there any possibility for the kid himself to create successful experiences for himself? Since this question comes from what Robin said in her post this week that people tend to have stronger self-efficacy online. It seems that people have a different degree of control over their self-efficacy. One extreme is that self-efficacy entirely depends on external experiences exerted on them. Another extreme is that it comes from within through self-reflection and adaptivity in challenges. But the link between self-reflection and self-efficacy seems to be tricky. For kids, they may lack self-reflection, but they still have high self-efficacy on certain things even risky activities. But for adults who may develop more sophisticated self-reflection, they may quit trying new challenges so soon. For so many times, I've also heard from adults that I couldn't do that.. I don't believe I could do that ... It's interesting that children always tend to say I don't want do that... I don't like that... So I'm thinking the development and changes in humans' belief system in a life long run.

Crawling out from under my rock to say a few things…

Apparently, I have been living under a rock, and I need to climb out, so I figured this was a safe place to do it. Personally, I felt that I had crawled out of my "little box" a long time ago, so while I may not be "see[ing] something cool" or getting on board with someone else's view of "how class is meant to be" (which is a discussion for another day), I feel plenty efficacious to learn new ideas and information and blend them with my existing knowledge. I mean last week I sat in class debating about theories that as of 3 years ago I had never heard of. So I clearly, I have some confidence in my knowledge and learning abilities, and some efficacy to voice my feelings and opinions in class.

That brings me to what I want to talk about here. I could not help but think about the generalizability of efficacy as I read these posts. It is quite clear that given the strong connection between experience and self-efficacy that generalizability is tough. Mastery experiences do not always carry over to new settings, which is some I have brought up before in thinking about efficacy transfer and scaring Michael away from skiing forever. Thus, while some people have the self-efficacy to debate and argue in person, others may only have the efficacy to do it through typing. In fact, that is one of the huge issues with cyberbullying, is that people have the efficacy to do things online that they would never do in person. This got me thinking about why self-efficacy is easier to build in an online setting. It is that mastery experiences are easier to come by? Since people can't physically argue back, does that make it easier to feel like you have succeeded? Or perhaps is it related to vicarious experiences, in seeing videos, and posts go viral, does that make people think theirs will do the same? Maybe seeing Ryan's strongly opinionated posts get read in class impacted the self-efficacy of others? I am not the technology expert here, and I am generally curious about building self-efficacy in online settings versus in person.  I personally am happy to debate and argue in person or online (ya'll should have figured that out by now), I like debates (dare I say I value them?), and I think they provide opportunities to learn, but clearly, I also have some efficacy in my abilities to engage in heated discussion. And even though last class, there were times when I felt like I lost, as Michael shot my ideas down, I will happily do it again. I think there is value (dirty word I know!) in thinking about other theories, about debating and finding connections between ideas. But perhaps this is only because I have had positive experiences doing so in the past. Nevertheless, while I am by no means an expectancy-value theorist, nor do I think SRL is everything, I do think just thinking about efficacy expectations doesn't do it for me. As Bandura himself said in his 1986 article The explanatory and predictive scope of self-efficacy theory "[the] mandate that perceived self-efficacy must exceed all other predictors of performance accords neither with self-efficacy theory nor with what is known about the dynamic operation of causal determinants."

Values, motivation, persistence, or self-efficacy?

Values, motivation, persistence, self-efficacy. So far, we have discussed about these concepts to explain people’s behavior, without having a happy ending for everyone. I mean, not everyone in the group seems convinced that self-efficacy explains to great extent our behavior. When I listened to people explaining their ideas, sometimes I had the feeling that they were not talking about the same behavioral phenomenon. To become a pattern, a target behavior goes through different stages (from weak to strong pattern) and the effects of the context on this target behavior is different depending on its developmental stage. For example, when the learner starts performing the target behavior, it is very important to provide contingent and continuous reinforcement. In this case, we might say that this particular configuration of the environment drives the learner’s behavior. However, as target behavior becomes stronger it relies less on its immediate consequences. According to Bandura’s proposal, the previous experience of reinforcement strengthens the learner’s sense of efficacy. So, at this point the performance of the target behavior is not affected by the environment as much as it was at the beginning, but it is driven by something “inside” the learner (self-efficacy expectancies). So, based on these expectancies, people make decisions about in what activities engage and how much they are willing to persist. At this point, concepts like motivation and values may play a role in the explanation of people’ behavior. Probably, this won’t convince you and you still think that people’s motivations and values are the principal determinants of their behavior. If so, I would like to ask you how goals become part of the learner’s system goal? Or how people value what they value? Is not that experience? And how different is that from the proposal of operant learning

I wonder if there are empirical studies addressing the differences among these constructs. The discussion around hypothetical scenarios can be confusing sometimes because we omit important information, like people’s history.  

Things I was too frustrated to bring up last class

Just a disclaimer to everyone, I love you all dearly, and I'm not trying to hate, I'm only trying to bring this class back on track, as it has been severely derailed by preconceived theoretical notions. I think I was a tad bit frustrated last class because of the initial arguments we made about the whole 'boys and girls having different efficacy' piece. While Ryan's arguments about Expectancy Value Theory were surely sound, I think he was missing the point by failing to look at the experiential notion of things that Bandura can bring to the table, and by leaving out the consideration that theories need to be compared and not favored.  However, him and Robin did raise some pertinent points about self-regulated learning that almost turned into another war of words, and was conveniently put away for another time. I will admit that Michael isn't always the be all and end all, but that's precisely how he wants us to think. There are many, many different ways of looking at things, if you're brave enough to not treat everything in such a square manner. That's the precise reason why the argument had such a weird vibe last class. Maybe it'll get better as people adapt to the way the class is meant to actually be.

Now, let's go into really deconstructing the whole gender and efficacy piece. We were talking about a female and male undergraduate student, out of which both of them fail to clear the entrance criteria for medical school. However, in our simulated scenario, the male has a higher likelihood to go on and work at a medical center while the female gives up. Now, assuming this in itself, in my opinion, is absolutely absurd. I think it could go either way, depending on the experiences attached to it, when you look at it from Bandura's viewpoint. I do agree that females in STEM do face a lot of sexism, but does this mean that they all don't persist? Sure, it does mean that they have a higher likelihood of dropping out, but is this a function of their expectancies at the outset? Or is it a function of how external influences affect their values? Now, if they persist through all of the external influences, don't you all think it'd create a greater amount of value (for some of them) than in the beginning because of the pleasure created from braving through all the obstacles? While EVT does go to explain how this happens in a different way, it misses out on some things, as does Bandura's cycle, because they are all 'theories'. That's what theories do. There'll never be a perfect one, and claiming that EVT is 'perfect' basically points to the fact that we all need to stop doing research on motivation altogether. I highly doubt that many of us would want to entertain that possibility, in the best interest of our careers. There is always warranted assert ability to any (yes, any) theory and research related to it, and this is what researchers often fail to understand.

Persistence creates value and this leads to higher efficacy. From Bandura's lens, way we persist is not through 'value', it is through the nature of belief. This is why I responded to the arguments about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and tried to bring in Rational Emotive Therapy into the discussion, because I thought we were missing out on it. Maybe if we're all a little more receptive and learn to think together rather than putting each other down, we can actually 'earn' the A for this class, which people seem to think is a free A , or that this class 'isn't graded' because Michael is cool enough to give us all an A. He just wants us to have shared purpose and learn, and I'm terrified seeing how some people don't seem to understand that they can't learn anything by staying within their own theoretical boxes. Maybe if you ventured out of your little box, you'd see something cool on the outside, and actually learn something. I don't blame you all though, you'll probably never figure out the power of shared purpose until you do a class on John Dewey. I guess we'll just have to pull you out from under the rock you've hidden under, even if it means breaking a few of your joints, because it is, I assure you, in your best interests.