Competence and Self-Worth (continued)

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Interviewer: What if you don’t do so well [in class]?

Christine: Then you’ve got an excuse. . . . It’s just easier to cope with if you think you haven’t put as much work into it.

Interviewer: What’s easier to cope with?

Christine: From feeling like a failure because you’re not good at it. It’s easier to say, “I failed because I didn’t put enough work into it” than “I failed because I’m not good at it.” (A. J. Martin, Marsh, Williamson, & Debus, 2003, p. 621)

Curiously, some students are more likely to perform at their best, and less likely to display self-handicapping behaviors, when outside circumstances indicate that their chances of success are slim. In such cases failure doesn’t indicate low ability and thus doesn’t threaten their sense of self-worth (Covington, 1992).

Self-handicapping behaviors have been observed in students as early as fifth grade, and those who frequently self-handicap achieve at lower levels than those who rarely self-handicap (Urdan & Midgley, 2001). As we learned in Chapter 3, young children (e.g., kindergartners and first graders) are generally fairly optimistic about their chances of future success; hence, they would have little reason to self-handicap.

Revisiting Self-Efficacy On the surface the concepts of competence and self-worth are similar to the concept of self-efficacy. In theory, however, there is a key difference between the needs for competence and self-worth, on the one hand, and self-efficacy, on the other. Having a sense of competence and self-worth may be a basic human need. In contrast, social cognitive theorists have suggested that self-efficacy is certainly a good thing, but they don’t go so far as to speculate that it is an essential driving force of human nature.

One point on which virtually all motivation theorists agree is that students’ confidence about their ability to handle day-to-day tasks is an important variable influencing motivation—especially intrinsic motivation—in the classroom. For instance, a lack of confidence leads to decreased interest and motivation (e.g., Boggiano & Pittman, 1992; Harter, Whitesell, & Kowalski, 1992; Mac Iver, Stipek, & Daniels, 1991; Reeve et al., 2004).

Enhancing Students’ Sense of Competence and Self-Worth We identified a variety of strategies for enhancing students’ sense of self and self-efficacy, and those strategies should enhance students’ sense of competence and self-worth as well. For instance, we should do the following:

• Help students achieve success, especially on challenging tasks.
• Give students concrete mechanisms through which they can track their progress over time.
• Minimize competitions and other situations in which students might judge themselves unfavorably in comparison with peers.

Ideally, learners’ sense of competence and self-worth should be based on a reasonably accurate appraisal of what they can and cannot accomplish. Learners who underestimate their abilities set unnecessarily low goals for themselves and give up easily after only minor setbacks. Those who overestimate their abilities—perhaps because they have been lavished with praise by parents or teachers or perhaps because school assignments have been consistently easy and unchallenging—may set themselves up for failure by forming unrealistically high expectations, exerting insufficient effort, or not addressing their weaknesses (Lockhart et al., 2002; Paris & Cunningham, 1996; H. W. Stevenson et al., 1990).