ABSTRACT
“Student’s self-efficacy perceptions depend in part on each of four other types of personal influence, students’ knowledge, metacognitive processes, goals, and affect”. Barry J. Zimmerman’s social cognitive approach to self-regulation is significant because he moves the debate away from such theoretical approaches that view self-regulation as an internal state that is personally discovered, to one that is strongly influenced by external factors such as environmental conditions, teacher instruction and modelling and peer/parental influence. Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in his or her innate ability to achieve goals. In Alfred Bandura’s words it’s a personal judgement of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations”. Researchers interested in academic self-regulated learning have begun to study processes that students use to initiate and direct their efforts to acquire knowledge and skill.
