Activity 7.2 (My Own Self-Efficacy Experience)

            In some circles I would have been called a nontraditional and first generation college student. However my college experience started out more from the lure of socializing and entertainment than from learning. In 1991 when I first attended college I would not have believed it if someone told me that twenty years later I would be a college professor. I probably would have literally laughed out loud. My academic and career journey has a lot to do with my self-efficacy; it started out weak but has continued to grow stronger with each milestone and goal that I achieve.

            As I stated before I started college in 1991 at the ripe young age of eighteen and thought I had the world at my fingertips, which came crashing down on me just 8 short months later when I was asked to leave the dormitories because of an outstanding debt that I had owed. I’m not proud of it; I was financially foolish back then, as many young adults are. However, it was that shocking and scary event that altered my life in a way that started a domino effect of future 'forks in the road'. I left college believing that I would never return, not just because I couldn’t afford it but because I wasn’t smart enough. You see I left in the third quarter of my first year with a GPA of 1.6! This communicated to me that I was not good enough; I lacked the skills and abilities to succeed in college. Don’t get me wrong, I did alright in high school, in fact I graduated with a 3.2, but it was my parent’s GPA not mine (I couldn’t get less than a C or I’d either get grounded or a really lengthy lecture). I went on with my life working in jobs ranging from restaurant work to a gas attendant to loan officer, which was more like a glorified secretary really, and I hated every one of them.

            Although I lacked confidence in my academic abilities, for some reason I always believed there was something better out there for me. Now this could have been my own stubbornness or arrogance, probably a little bit of both. However it wasn’t until I was 22 and involved with a man who was in college that I had even begun to toy with the idea of going back to school. In January of 1996 I enrolled in my first semester back in the college saddle and boy did I have a lot to make up for. I will never forget my first writing class and how I would stare at the computer screen having absolutely no idea how to form my thoughts and then communicate them in writing (shocking I know!). It was as if those five years out of high school took all the skill out of me and squashed it like a bug. As Pajares said “But if she lacks confidence in her academic capabilities, she may well shy away from challenging courses, will approach the SAT with apprehension and self-doubt, and may not even consider college attendance.” I was terribly apprehensive about attending college and had talked about quitting several times. It took me about a year to shrug the doubt off my self-efficacy plate. But as time went on, semester after semester, cleaning up my old nasty transcripts and replacing them with passing grades, I began to believe in my ability to be academically successful.

            It wasn’t so much what other people told me I was capable of doing, trust me I did not have a lot of supporters, it was what I told myself I could do. I had what’s discussed in Pajares’ chapter as reasonable efficacy appraisals (p. 17), “which are the most functional self-efficacy judgments that slightly exceed what an individual can actually accomplish that increase effort and persistence”. Class after class, semester by semester, experience after experience; all of this built up my self-efficacy and self-belief. I eventually got my Bachelor’s degree and quickly enrolled in a Master’s program. However one thing I noticed, when I first started the graduate school process, was that my self-efficacy started to weaken again. Not to the extent that it was before the start of my collegiate journey, but enough that I started second guessing my writing and research ability. I would finish my sentences in class with a question mark communicating uncertainty. Why did I doubt myself again? I think it had a lot to do with how I invariably interpreted my mastery experience. According to Pajares (2005), “This can lead to situations in which inappropriate interpretations can diminish the very self-efficacy beliefs required to push on in the face of adversity” (p. 345). I find that my self-efficacy tends to be a tad weak in the beginning of a new academic adventure (for example it happened with this class), but with experience moves more quickly from weak to strong in a shorter amount of time. It doesn’t take me a year as it did back in 1996, now it’s a few weeks, and sometimes only a day or two.

            I hope that I model to students the self-efficacy that I have in my own abilities but in their abilities too. “Teacher self-efficacy also fosters student achievement and students’ achievement beliefs across various areas and levels. Self-efficacy is contagious, which is to say that students can easily “catch” a teacher’s own sense of confidence” (p. 361). If I can do it, they most certainly can as well.