Self-Efficacy of First Year University Physics Students: Do Gender and Prior Formal Instruction in Physics Matter?

Abstract

Self-efficacy represents a person’s belief that he or she can perform a particular task. It has been found to correlate with academic achievement and people’s choice of subjects and career. While relatively widely studied, self-efficacy has not received much attention in tertiary physics. Therefore, we adapted and validated a short Physics Self-Efficacy Questionnaire before administering it four times in one year to the first-year physics cohort at *Institution* (N between 122 and 281). Investigating whether gender and prior formal physics instruction mattered to students’ physics self-efficacy, we found that both showed a significant effect. Females consistently reported lower self-efficacy than males, and males with no prior formal physics instruction showed the highest self-efficacy of any subgroup, suggesting a ‘male overconfidence syndrome’. Investigating correlations between students’ physics self-efficacy and end-of-semester physics examination scores, these only seemed to develop after a relatively long time of physics study (of the order of a year or more); females developed such a correlation faster than males. Our findings conclude that gender and prior formal instruction in physics do matter when studying physics self-efficacy, which may have important consequences both for the study of self-efficacy itself, and for the way tertiary physics is taught.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.