I’ve got good news: cognitive psychology has SO MANY practical insights to offer teachers.
- How to help students remember and apply information
- How to foster motivation when students seem apathetic
- How to manage working memory load so students don’t bonk
And so forth.
Alas, I’ve also got some related bad news. All these practical insights can feel like a salad of unrelated — or contradictory — advice bits. How exactly do prequestions fit with growth mindset and stress? Should AI or mindfulness be our next school-wide initiative? Do executive functions tell us anything about interleaving? And — please — what about mini-whiteboards?
For some time now, I’ve been proposing that our field needs a model to hold all these pieces together. If we who write books and speak at conferences simply lob more new concepts at teachers, their resulting frustration reveals an important truth: teachers do not need more bits-n-pieces.
Well, I’ve got MORE good news. Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy may be the strongest and most flexible framework for organizing our fragmented field.
I’ve just finished reading an excellent book: Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory in Action, by Dr. Neil Gilbride. As mapped out by Gilbride, self-efficacy acts as a kind of rosetta stone. It helps teachers see the relationship between one nichey research field (“retrieval practice!”) and another (“school cell-phone disruptions!”).
Here’s the story.
Believe in Yourself
Let’s start with two hypotheticals:
- I have to change a flat tire on my car. I think to myself: “there’s just no way I can get this done. I haven’t changed a tire in years. Ugh…”
- I’m asked to organize a conference about executive functions for first- and second-grade teachers. I think to myself: “I got this. I’ve been studying working memory for years. I’m a highly-organized guy. Consider this done.”
In each case, I’m invited to undertake a specific action, and I have reached an opinion about my ability to accomplish it.
In Bandura’s more formal language, “self efficacy” is
People’s judgments of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance.
In the first case — changing that tire — I have low self-efficacy. In my opinion, my capacity to get this job done (“execute a course of action to attain a designated type of performance”) is quite low. In the second case — organizing an EF conference — I have high self-efficacy. I think I got this.
Gilbride highlights several key features of Bandura’s concept. For instance:
- We have different levels of self-efficacy for different tasks.
- A student might have high self-efficacy when it comes to writing an English essay, but low self-efficacy for solving geometry problems.
- Self-efficacy emphasizes an individual’s self-perception. These self-judgments, of course, might not be accurate.
- Despite my low self-efficacy, I could get that tire changed quite easily.
- I might have high self-efficacy beliefs about conference organizing but still be very bad at it.
- Research shows that self-efficacy predicts behavior. And with good reason.
- Students with high self-efficacy are much likelier to undertake all the various tasks we give them to help them learn.
- As for students with low self-efficacy: why should they bother to try things? They already know they won’t succeed!
Having explored these crucial points (and others), Gilbride considers the importance of self-efficacy in three spheres of education: instruction,practice, andbehavior. These chapters offer the kind of large-scale framework I’ve been hoping for: a framework to hold together the otherwise unrelated bits-n-pieces of our field. As I read Gilbride’s book, I routinely found myself thinking: “Aha! Now I can see how these pieces fit together.”
Let me explain.
The Big Picture
Let’s go back to two examples cited earlier: “retrieval practice” and “cell-phone distractions.” Although relevant to schools, these topics seem utterly unrelated. What concept could hold them together?
Self-efficacy can.
As Gilbride explains in his chapter on instruction, teachers can increase self-efficacy by teaching well. Every solid teaching strategy we have — from spacing to interleaving to retrieval practice to working-memory management — helps students understand the work that they do. In so doing, they build self-efficacy — at least on this topic, in this discipline.
What does all that have to do with cell phones?
Gilbride’s chapter on behavior explains, quite sensibly, that a student’s troubling behavior might result from a self-efficacy misalignment.
- They might have low self-efficacy about the work I’m asking them to do: solving work-rate problems, or playing the left-hand part of the Moonlight Sonata.
- Or, they might have high self-efficacy about the off-task behavior that they’re doing: making their classmates laugh, or playing Candy Crush.
Given this set of circumstances, it’s little wonder that the student has turned away from the math book and snuck out the cell phone.
Because I can recalculate both these topics — retrieval practice and cell phones — into a common denominator, I can now think about them sensibly at the same time:
How can I make cell phones less enticing to my student Rory?
Well, he clearly has a high sense of self-efficacy for Minecraft: no wonder he’s on his phone.
Perhaps I can use retrieval practice to ramp up his self-efficacy for work-rate problems. Once he starts remembering and understanding this concept better, his increased self-efficacy for classwork might offset the lure of the that blocky fortress he’s building.
That final statement might be overly optimistic; self-efficacy alone might not be enough to counter the pull of phones. But it does help us see how otherwise unrelated ideas might interact with each other.
When I go back to the list of terms that started this blog post (prequestions, growth mindset, stress, AI…), I can see fairly quickly how each on promotes and/or undermines self-efficacy. That common reference point allows me — and all of us — to conceptualize them together.
Bonus Feature: Better Definitions
At the same time that self-efficacy theory helps bring disparate pieces of our field together, it also — as Gilbride describes it — provides consistent and practical definitions for words that have otherwise felt under-defined.
A simple example: the phrase “mastery learning.” While this goal might sound bracing, it also strikes me as a touch grandiose. In my 20 classroom years, I’ve seen students offer perceptive interpretations and conjure rich stories. I don’t know, however, that I’m comfortable expecting all my students to aspire to mastery. For most people, mastery takes decades.
As explained by Gilbride, Bandura wants students to have “mastery experiences.” In his framework, a mastery experience shifts a student’s self-efficacy beliefs. Consider a student who believes that he can’t balance chemical equations. After meeting with the teacher and trying several practice problems, the student learns that he CAN in fact balance chemical equations. That’s a mastery experience. The student started with low self-efficacy, and ended with higher self-efficacy.
Bandura’s “mastery,” in other words, doesn’t require professional level accomplishment. It’s not reserved for the rare student, and needn’t exist in a lofty realm. We strive to give all students “mastery experiences”: that is, to help them raise self-efficacy in each of their classes.
TL;DR
Cognitive psychology does not suffer from a lack of good ideas. It suffers from a lack of coherence. Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy helps us not because it adds new practices, but because it helps us judge and coordinate the practices we already use. That is: self-efficacy is not one more thing to add to the pile. It is a way of organizing the pile—so that teachers can make better judgments, with less frustration, and more confidence that the pieces actually fit together. Check out Gilbride’s book, and see if you agree.
Gilbride, N. (2025). Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory in Action. Hachette UK.
