Social Persuasion:
Telling a primary school pupil that they can achieve anything that they desire often has positive outcomes on how the pupil thinks about themselves and believe that they can achieve anything. This is an example of social persuasion where positive feedback encourages positive outcomes. Social persuasion can be used to persuade others that they have the capabilities to succeed and will therefore try harder to succeed in tasks (Bandura, 1994), through a promotion of their perception of their self-efficacy.
There are many sources of social persuasion, particularly from teachers, parents, self-talk, and peers. In education, learners are affected by social persuasion from teachers in the classroom who encouragement them can do tasks set and react positively when a pupil gives answers that demonstrate their knowledge, promoting a learner's perceived self-efficacy. However, negative social persuasion from teachers and parents leads to a decrease in a pupil's perceived self-efficacy (Lam et al, 2016). A study by Lam showed that the effect of negative social persuasion had similar influences whether it came from the mother, father, or teacher of a pupil. However, Lam's study showed that when positive social persuasion was given to a pupil, a mother giving positive feedback had a statistically greater influence on the increase in a pupil's self-efficacy. This research was measured based on the outcomes of questionnaires given to 122 pupils in a secondary school in Hong Kong with 99 of them providing responses that could be interpreted for the study. This is a good sample size, however, there is a lack of a control group for comparison, to see if the increase in self-efficacy was affected by the parents and teachers giving positive social persuasion, or if there were other external factors influencing it. A study by Lee reports the opposite to these findings as the study finds that not all negative feedback from teachers is detrimental to a pupil's perceived self-efficacy (Lee, 2019). This study finds that when pupils have high epistemic motivation, negative feedback on a task will instead lead to a higher effort to better understand and complete a task given. However, since this result is only found in pupils with high epistemic motivation, this study cannot be used to say that negative feedback is a good strategy for every pupil since it is circumstantial.
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It must also be challenged that the background of the children in the study by Lam is entirely different from the background of children in the United Kingdom (Lam et al, 2016), where Pupil X is from. A study by Ng to examine the cultural differences between the responses parents gave to their children's performance showed that American parents emphasized their children's successes but deemphasized their failures. Chinese parents, meanwhile, chose to emphasize their children's failures (Ng, 2007). However, this social persuasion may be misinterpreted instead for the cultural backgrounds, where it is found that East Asian countries are more likely to believe that intelligence is malleable and with a growth mindset, pupils can achieve far more than what they think and recover quickly from errors they have made (Schroder et al, 2017). This study by Schroder may instead suggest that it is not social persuasion that leads to higher self-efficacy. Instead, the cultural background of a pupil has a larger impact on self-efficacy and improving results. If self-efficacy is presumed to have positive effects on pupil outcomes and attainment, then it follows that this cultural background could be behind why there are three to five times as many Asian-American students at the top American universities than their proportionate share (Zhao et al, 2019). When considering Pupil X who comes from a Western background, the outstanding achievements she has made previously may have motivated her further and increased her self-efficacy. However, when starting her A-Level maths and finding it increasingly difficult with more failures, the lack of success would lead to less positive feedback from parents and teachers, potentially limiting her self-efficacy for completing maths problems.
Another source of social persuasion comes from the person through self-talk, the internal or external dialogue influenced by the subconscious mind (Healthline, 2020). Studies have shown that the use of self-talk can persuade participants to believe in their capabilities to succeed, increasing their self-efficacy (Tugsbaatar, 2021). A study by Hatzigeorgiadis found that when young tennis players were split into two groups, the group who had been training and practicing their forehand tennis shots whilst using motivational self-talk, performed significantly better than a control group who did not use self-talk (Hatzigeorgiadis et al, 2008). This significant correlation may provide some proof that social persuasion influences the players' self-efficacy which explains the enabling effects of self-efficacy on task performance. There were only 46 people in this experiment, however, there was a control group which helps to show that the significant statistical evidence of players' improvement is likely due to the increase in self-efficacy. This positive effect of self-talk on self-efficacy is also supported by research by Ewart. Ewart found that there is a significant correlation between the ability to predict the duration of a stay in the hospital with the self-efficacy of a patient - a patient with a higher self-efficacy of their improvement was able to leave the hospital in a shorter time after major heart surgery than a patient with a lower self-efficacy (Ewart, 2013). This research is confirmed by a study by Sarkar, where there is substantial statistical evidence that when patients measured their cardiac self-efficacy, a lower self-efficacy could be used to predict hospitalization due to heart failure or all-cause mortality. This study of 1024 older adults shows that self-efficacy can be a quick predictor in determining a patient's cardiac function and outcome, with a large enough sample size to suggest this correlation is significant (Sarkar, 2009). Perhaps the use of self-talk should be encouraged in schools since there is a large amount of evidence to support findings that self-talk increases self-efficacy and, through the improvement, increased progress in tennis shots and hospitalizations. Extending to academic progress, this would mean that a pupil would have progress allowing Pupil X to be a successful learner.
A further source of social persuasion comes from peers of the person where self-efficacy is being measured. In the case of Pupil X, this would be her classmates who, when she joined her new school, became negative in their approach towards her, saying that she should not be studying maths because it was not a subject for girls. This negative response from her classmates easily decreased her self-belief and combined with the lack of positive feedback from teachers, since she was finding the work harder to complete, could easily have led to a decrease in self-efficacy which impacted her results. Peer pressure, a negative form of social persuasion, has long been cited as a negative influence on pupils and is normally associated with irresponsible behaviors (Ford, 2014) and there are studies to show that when peer pressure increases for a student, their self-efficacy for academic tasks decreases. Kiran-Esen performed a study of 546 high school students using the Self-Efficacy Expectations Scale for Adolescents (SEES-A) which is more generalized than the GSE scale since it looks at academic, social, and emotional efficacy (Kiran-Esen, 2012). The study established that when measured peer pressure increased, the SEES-A decreased and led to negative results academically too. This large study shows statistical evidence for the negative correlation and was performed on pupils the same age and background as Pupil X, meaning that we can link the peer pressure she received from other pupils in her maths class directly to a drop in self-efficacy.
However, there are examples of how peer pressure can lead to positive outcomes for self-efficacy. Children regulate their own beliefs in their efficacy which affects their academic interest and therefore school achievement (Bandura, 1993). There are many children's groups that use peer pressure to help children regulate these beliefs. For example, peer mentoring groups such as Boy Scouts and Girl Guiding positively use peer pressure to drive all their pupils towards a similar positive goal, often helping the community (Ford, 2014). These groups help us to see that when peer pressure is used positively then higher self-efficacy can be achieved. For Pupil X, positive peer pressure from her previous school, where it was frequently stated that girls can succeed in maths, led to her having a higher self-efficacy which in turn made her a successful learner since she made progress throughout secondary school. Perhaps, in mixed education settings, an emphasis should still be placed on women in STEM being successful, to encourage positive peer pressure and help improve self-efficacy so more pupils can become successful learners.
Gender and Social Persuasion:
The main factor that changed between Pupil X's secondary school and the school she chose to go to for A-Levels was the presence of both genders in all her classes when she had previously only had females in her class. Her secondary school provided a positive atmosphere for being a woman in STEM, where no comments were made about their gender restricting them in what they could achieve later in life. As talked about earlier, the negative social persuasion from her peers, through the frequent jokes about how women were worse at maths, could have influenced the decrease in her grades significantly.
When looking at who famous mathematicians in STEM are, the majority are men. Often women who have made significant contributions to science have had their achievements overlooked. This historical trend has unfortunately continued into the present day with some people still choosing to believe there is still no place for women in STEM. This affects pupils of all ages with a large confidence gap in maths and science and this is becoming noticeable even in primary school-aged pupils. The confidence gap in STEM is noticeable with only one in seven girls thinking that they are good at maths, compared to one in four boys by the time they start high school (Sadker, 1994). This confidence gap affects pupils to the point where it affects their subsequent educational choices with fewer female students opting to take science and maths past the compulsory age, as shown by data in 2019. Only 38.5% of A-Level maths entries were from females and for further maths A-Level it is even lower with only 28.4% of entries being from females (Ofqual, 2020). This impacts the career paths that female pupils can choose and leads to the shortage of women in STEM (Rittmayer et al, 2008) that is currently observed. When looking at Pupil X, this confidence gap can be applied to her, since her previous confidence in the subject has diminished. Being surrounded by a class with a majority of male students who are more likely to believe that they are good at maths puts her at a disadvantage in believing she has the capabilities to succeed in her maths lessons.
When women are given positive feedback related to a task their self-efficacy for the tasks increases (Betz et al, 2000) and this should be used since women have lower confidence in their capabilities to succeed. Women have also been shown to have higher levels of self-efficacy after attending talks about gender discrimination in scientific fields than women who did not (Rittmayer et al, 2000). In the study, the talks about gender discrimination were used to help women think about previous negative feedback they had received about their work and other women's work in STEM subjects as discrimination against them, rather than think about it as failures in their work (Rittmayer et al, 2000). This way of thinking about negative feedback is advantageous in breaking down barriers about women in STEM since it explains to pupils that negative feedback is biased because of their gender. This study cannot be taken to be reliable evidence in the argument that positive social persuasion has a large impact on women's self-efficacy since the people who attended these talks were interested in STEM subjects to begin with and therefore may have already had a higher self-efficacy than those not at the talk since they enjoy the subject. Enjoyment of STEM subjects will naturally lead to higher self-efficacy because they will be more engaged in the learning and will want to achieve success. This enjoyment also fits in with the idea that they are successful learners from our previous definitions. For Pupil X, talking about the gender discrimination in STEM may benefit her and make her understand that the comments made by peers in her class are not based on her ability, and showing previous examples of successful women in STEM may encourage higher self-efficacy too (Rittmayer et al, 2000).
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