The Importance Of Self-Efficacycy In Science

For students to have positive attitudes about learning, a teacher has to have a positive attitude about teaching. Woolfolk (2016) defines a teacher’s sense of efficacy as a teacher’s belief that he or she can reach even difficult students to help them learn. “This confident belief appears to be one

Surveys, according to Lovelace & Brickman (2013), are able to divulge information critical to the educator’s pedagogical practices, since practitioners can measure how students’ attitudes toward math and science influence their learning. Attitudes toward science are either positive or negative, and these innate feelings and predispositions affect students’ ability to learn science and math and acquire mastery of the subjects. Thus, educational practitioners use these psychometric measurements, in conjunction with learning outcomes to draw conclusions about levels of efficacy in their own instructional

In 9th grade, I began tutoring every Tuesday after school and this continued through 10th grade. During that time, I discovered that my students had a negative disposition towards science. Many saw science as "boring." I wanted to change that idea, to help them realize the wonders of science, to prove that science is fascinating and entertaining. The following summer, I prepared my proposal and pitched my ideas to Mr. Terrence Davis, Director of the Boys and Girls Club of Hopkinsville.

In addition to research based programs that integrate science and literacy learning into one combined lesson there are other strategies that teachers can use to integrate these two subjects. The 5-E’s model for lesson planning is an effective way to structure science lessons to incorporate literacy learning. The 5-E’s include engaging the student in the learning, exploring the content topic, further learning is done through explaining the topic, students are then required to elaborate on the topic, and then asked to evaluate their learning. In the article “Content Area Literacy: Individualizing Student Instruction in Second Grade Science” (Connor et al., 2010), researchers created the ISI-Science curriculum and implemented

Humans have always tried to understand scientific concepts relevant to the individual and to society. Basically, the branch of science started out when ancient people like Nicholas Copernicus, began to wonder about our world. Unlike earlier philosophers, Copernicus applied a systematic method to find answers to his question about our solar system. Views of how science works should be kept simple. Observe your world, find a problem to solve and then apply methods to find the answer. Young children do this naturally. Education should take adavantage of the natural curiosity of the children and apply it to the classroom. Always considering safety of course, teachers should allow time for observation and let students discover answers through their own experimentation. While prominent professors claim science teaching is complicated, like when Richard, J. Hamilton from Arizona State University claims "The whole prosess of learning has turned out to be far more complex than most imagined, and I believe that science educators are struggling to find a new, more effective approach to the complexity" (Hamilton, 1992, p. 202). Respectfully disagreeing, science is still simple. Two like charges simply repel and discovering the concept is not complex. Students learn by exploring and teaching science must incorporate this hands-on approach in order to reach mastery of required teaching

Bandura defines self-efficacy beliefs are awareness of the individual's’ potential and capabilities to accomplish a goal. Self-efficacy belief of teachers is a significant identifier of teachers’ performance and motivation in teaching the specific content successfully, however, K-12 science teachers’ engineering self-efficacy beliefs are rarely discussed. Additionally, professional development opportunities play a crucial role to improve teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Assessing K-12 science teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in engineering is growing in importance

The strength of individuals' self-efficacy is a powerful agent regarding their effort or willingness to attemp or complete a challenging task (Bandura, 1997, 1997). Self-efficacy is the extent to which an individual feels able to complete a task, activity, or reach a goal (Bandura, 1997, 1997). Consequently, counselors' self-efficacy may determine the likelihood and accuracy regarding how they act in unclear situation (e.g., ethical dilemmas). Effective practitioners integrate the knowledge of laws and ethical standards into their work with clients (Kocet, 2006). Therefore, the development of ethical knowledge and its integration into clinical work is an important issue to examine.

Self-efficacy beliefs are considered as the foundation of human agency. They influence many aspects of human functioning (i.e., the exercise of human agency), such as one’s choice of tasks, goal setting, motivation level, investment level, psycho-affective states, and accomplishments. They influence “people’s goals and aspirations, how well they motivate themselves, and their perseverance in the face of difficulties and adversity” (Bandura, 2006). Also, self-efficacy beliefs “shape people’s outcome expectations” and determine how opportunities and impediments are viewed” (Bandura, 2006, p.171). Self-efficacy beliefs are not a stable character traits of an individual, but rather, an active and learned system of beliefs held in context (Bandura,1997).

It is my intention then to use an amalgamation of student-centred and more traditional instructional strategies. Being a science teacher enriching the direct instructional method which is demonstrably effective in teaching science (Tweed, 2004) exhibiting high effect size (Hattie, 2009) and then coupling with group activities for higher order thinking and ICT for authentic learning is very

This year, I am taking a bigger leadership role at my school. I am one of three content leaders that replaced our instructional coach. As a science content leader, part of my focus is assist teachers in teaching science. Our goal is to make sure science is taught in all grade levels. In the past, science has been pushed to the side because science is not always a tested subject. It is a tested subject in 5th grade. Most of the responsibility falls on the 5th grade teachers. This role is supposed to help make sure science is taught in all grades, so that our 5th grade teacher is not at a disadvantage when it comes to science. Me been the 5th grade science teacher for 4 years now, I have taken this role very seriously. Another part of my role is to offer myself to observe teachers teach science and provide feedback. This is where I think this activity for this course came in very handy.

In this article a study was done at the University of Calgary to measure how well self efficacy works in a classroom. They measured two types of outcome efficacy; proximally and distally, the overall teacher's performance, feedback given from teachers to students, and how positive or negative the student felt about the feedback. The students answered a 30 question-questionnaire covering the four issues. The result found that both types of outcome efficacy were highly related to motivation, but feedback from teachers have little effect on students performance.

I recently found a sufficient scholarly source that strongly relates to my school’s mission and the topic of Teaching and Learning. The article “Self-Efficacy: A Key to Improving the Motivation of Struggling Learners,” by Howard Margolis and Patrick McCabe, talks about the idea of teachers being in charge of reinforcing self-confidence in struggling students in order to increase the probability of a student becoming successful through persistance and motivation. Margolis and McCabe talk about the benefits of systemic instruction, which involves the teachers organizing their students taks from easy to difficult and explains step by step instruction of what they need to do, and provides the students with feedback and guided practice. Margolis

As we know, efficacy beliefs will influence how people feel, think, behave and motivate themselves. For teachers, it is a little idea but with big impact. It is believed that teacher efficacy underlies instructional decisions and students’ learning outcomes (Soodak and Podell, 1997, p.214, Elami, 2008, p. 2). Specifically, if teachers strongly believe in their capabilities, they will create mastery experience for their students (Bandura, 1993, p.140), moreover, efficacious teachers are more likely to be satisfied with their work and committed to teaching (Duffin, French and Patrick, 2012, p. 828); on the contrary, if they are filled with self-doubts, they will fail to teach students efficiently and effectively (Gavora, 2010, p. 18). Therefore,

Science has always been a passion of mine because of its endless discoveries, ability to change the world, and the wide variety of fields it has to offer. The possibilities seem endless when we explore the field of science as well as the achievement of new knowledge, however as I become closer to attaining my teaching credentials I have come to realize that not every student has the same drive as I do to learn about it, much less comprehends it. The most frequent struggle I consistently noticed when teaching students with a science textbook was the inability to comprehend what was being read, a struggle that I lived through myself when I was younger. I can clearly recall in high school hardly ever understanding what was being read from the science textbook unless my teachers explained it in simpler terms or examples. Science alone is a challenging subject that has difficult vocabulary words attached to it, and as a future science teacher I want to find different strategies to improve my students’ comprehension of science texts. It is because of this that I decided to research how self-regulation plays a role in the science classroom and whether there are any benefits or improvements because of it. The purpose of my research is to discover how self-regulation impacts secondary students’ comprehension of science texts.

Science is one of those subjects that has always been a little fuzzy to me. I find science to be intriguing when learning about space because the stars and other planets blow my mind and I keep wanting to understand more. Another topic that interests me is how the Earth is made up and the different cycles that are involved in making the Earth evolve. I believe science to be very hands on and interactive, and that’s probably one of the reasons that I don’t have a bad attitude about science. However, science has never been my best subject in school because of all the math involved, the chemical equations, and the experiments. Chemistry was one of the toughest classes I took in high school and I think this was because of how fast pace my teacher presented and went through the material. We had groups to go through all the experiments with in class, and even though I had people to rely on to help me through these processes, I still didn’t understand the concepts and what was going on with these reactions. Throughout my schooling, I have had very enthusiastic teachers that loved science and then I have had other teachers that aren’t passionate about science and because of that I don’t remember those teachers as well.