Journal of Scholastic Inquiry: Special Edition
Volume 10, Page 137
underachieving students reported a significant lack of mastery experiences and less verbal persuasion than the group of achieving students (Fong & Krause, 2014). The actual levels of self-efficacy did not differ between the groups, but there was a sufficiently significant difference between the sources that Fong and Krause (2014) concluded that the antecedents to efficacy are the salient factors to performance. In a later study, Zientek et al. (2017) investigated the four sources of self-efficacy in remedial math community college students. The results indicated that all four sources of selfefficacy explained the variance in the students’ math skills (Zientek et al., 2017). However, while all four sources influenced self-efficacy, mastery experience was determined to be the strongest predictor (Zientek et al., 2017). Studies with college students in Singapore (Loo & Choy, 2013) and Taiwan (Lin, 2016) also found all four sources correlated with self-efficacy. In examining the influence of all four sources of self-efficacy on academic self-efficacy, computer self-efficacy, and programming self-efficacy in undergraduate students in computing majors, Lin (2016) reported that all four sources of self-efficacy contributed significantly to the variance in academic self-efficacy. Lin (2016) also noted that more persistent students had higher scores in mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, and verbal persuasion. Loo and Choy (2013), on the other hand, found all four sources to be significantly interrelated for math students. While there was a significant positive correlation between academic performance and all four sources, mastery experience had the strongest correlation (Loo & Choy, 2013). Additionally, only mastery experience explained the significant variance in predicting academic performance (Loo & Choy, 2013). Fong and Krause (2014) included a similar note about how it may be the sources themselves that relate to academic achievement. Sources of Self-efficacy in Online Learning Environments It does not appear that the four sources of self-efficacy were examined together in the context of online learning prior to this study. Instead, prior research in the realm of online learning has examined individual sources. While research in traditional learning environments has repeatedly reported how mastery experiences is the strongest predictor of self-efficacy, only Jan (2015) reported that the strongest correlation was between prior experience and academic
