Kathryn Ley

Brief Report: Self-Efficacy of Developmental College Students

Self-efficacy refers to personal beliefs about ones capabilities to learn or perform skills at designated levels (Bandura, 1986). It involves judgments of ones capability to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance. Counselors have proposed interventions that would increase self-efficacy to improve academic performance of some learners (Multon, Brown & Lent, 1991; Pajares, 1996) and with good reason. A learners self-efficacy influences his or her cognitive functions (Bandura, 1993) and performance (Pajares). Furthermore, the influence of self-efficacy on performance has been stronger in lower achieving students than in students at higher levels of achievement at the same grade level (Multon et al.). This brief report includes an explanation of self-efficacy, differences between self-efficacy and other aspects of the self-system, and findings of research studies into the self-efficacy of students, including developmental learners. Finally, we will propose a few implications for classroom instruction and counselor interventions based upon these findings.

Providing feedback to distant students

Describes a feedback system for distant students including the tools and documents to provide feedback on frequent fixed response assignments and on projects or essay response assignments. A distance feedback system depends upon carefully planned, written assignments; specified evaluation criteria; and technology. It includes documentation, progress tracking, standardized responses based upon the specified evaluation criteria, and multiple assessments during the course. The proposed feedback system accommodates technological limitations yet provides useful feedback to facilitate distant student learning. The system could be adapted to benefit students enrolled in traditional instruction. A description of the feedback system components follows a brief introduction to instructional feedback and feedback levels and functions.

Developmental Students Don't Know That They Don't Know Part I: Self-regulation

In this two part series of brief reports, we will review the literature of the self-regulation field, and provide evidence that at least one of the problems experienced by developmental learners is their lack of self-regulatory ability. Research performed on separate groups of students has revealed that lower achieving students lack key regulatory processes which affect achievement. Part one will review this research, and part two will focus on instructional guidelines that can be used in the classroom to support self-regulation. This is an important construct because self-regulation is not a trait, but a skill. Instructors can provide self-regulation support in their instructional modules to compensate for the students lack of self-regulatory ability.

Developmental Students Don't Know That They Don't Know Part II: Bridging the Gap

In the first part of this two-part article (Young & Ley, 2000), we described developmental student self-regulatory deficiencies and how self-regulatory skills foster cognitive and metacognitive skills. In this second part we suggest four compensatory self-regulation teaching guidelines for developmental teaching and compensate for the self-regulation gaps identified in the first part of this article and associated with lower achievement and developmental status. For each guideline we suggest specific teaching activity to support self-regulation.