Secondary School Students’ Chemistry Self-Efficacy: Its Importance, Measurement, and Sources

Abstract

Self-efficacy for learning chemistry refers to one’s beliefs about his or her ability to successfully perform specific tasks in chemistry. For students to be successful in school chemistry, they need to have a positive sense of self-efficacy. Research has repeatedly indicated that individual students’ levels of self-efficacy affect the effort they spend on an activity, the persistence they put forth when confronting obstacles, the resilience they show in the face of adverse situations, the level of academic achievement they attain, and the enrolment choices they make. Students construct their self-efficacy beliefs from four major sources of information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. Although chemistry education researchers have developed several questionnaires to measure students’ perceived self-efficacy, most of them are not specific enough to measure chemistry self-efficacy. Researchers have paid even less attention to investigating how classroom chemistry teaching contributes to the development of students’ chemistry self-efficacy. This chapter provides an extensive review of the literature on chemistry self-efficacy, reports recent research on chemistry self-efficacy conducted in Hong Kong secondary schools, and offers some directions for future research on chemistry self-efficacy.