Poster #230 - The Influence of Children’s Friendships on Academic Self-Efficacy

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Research consistently demonstrates that a child’s self-efficacy beliefs are important in determining academic motivation and academic performance. Interestingly, self-efficacy develops mainly from four sources: one’s own mastery experiences, one’s vicarious experiences, social persuasion from others, and one’s emotional/physiological states. Important to the current study, children’s close peer relationships may influence children’s self-efficacy development by shaping self-efficacy source experiences. The current study assessed close peer involvement in children’s general academic and specific math self-efficacy beliefs by investigating the influence(s) that self-nominated classroom best friends and self-nominated classroom least liked friends had on children’s self-efficacy source development. Our main hypothesis was that higher quality relationships would be more influential in efficacy source development than would lower quality peer relationships.

Participants were children from 2nd through 6th grade, 125 total participants (68 female, 57 males). Children completed questionnaires during two separate individual interviews. The first questionnaire gathered information about each child’s close classroom peer relationships. The Academic Self-Efficacy and Math Self-Efficacy questionnaires were adapted from the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales and were used to assess each child’s academic and math self-efficacy, respectively. The Sources of Academic Self-Efficacy and Sources of Math Self-Efficacy were used to assess how influential each source of self-efficacy was for each child’s general academic self-efficacy and specific math self-efficacy. The Relationship Quality Questionnaire was used to gather information about the quality of each child’s relationship with their classroom best friend and their classroom least-liked friend. Finally, the Friendship and the Sources of Self-Efficacy questionnaire was created for each child’s best friendship and least-liked friendship for both general academics and math to determine how each friendship facilitates children’s self-efficacy development via the vicarious experience and social persuasion sources of self-efficacy.

As predicted, all children evaluated their classroom best friend (M=2.71, SD=1.22) as being more helpful and more supportive in their schoolwork activities than their classroom least-like friend (M=1.66, SD=1.21). Further, girls (M = 2.99, SD = 1.17) evaluated their classroom best friends as being more influential in their self-efficacy source development than did boys (M = 2.37, SD = 1.20). Gender difference also emerged with boys (M=3.45, SD=.46) evaluating their math self-efficacy higher than did girls (M=3.15, SD=.60). In addition, while no gender differences emerged for the general academic sources of self-efficacy, sources of specific math self-efficacy were evaluated higher by boys (M=3.45, SD=.46) than they were by girls (M=3.15, SD=.60). Girls also evaluated sources of general academic self-efficacy (M=3.38, SD=.48) higher than they did specific sources of math self-efficacy (M=3.15, SD=.60), while no differences in sources of academic or math emerged for boys. Lastly, all children evaluated vicarious experiences and social persuasion sources of both general academic and specific math self-efficacy equally, while boys evaluated mastery experiences and physiological states as being more influential in the development of their self-efficacy than did girls (see Table 1).
 

Authors

• Cassie C. Feck, Auburn University at Montgomery
  Presenting Author

• Glen E. Ray, Auburn University at Montgomery
  Non-Presenting Author