– Educational level and cultural factors moderate individuals’ learning experiences and subsequently their self-efficacy beliefs,
particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains.
– The results suggest the importance of intervening early in STEM-related academic and career development and attending to
gender and racial/ethnic influences in the types of learning experiences to which individuals are exposed.
– The authors found that variance explained was significantly higher in non-STEM domains (R2 .37) relative to STEM domains (R2 .22), suggesting that other factors are also important in accounting for self-efficacy beliefs related to STEM subjects.
– In all of the subsamples studied, Performance Accompishment (PA) was the dominant influence on self-efficacy. Once PA was statistically controlled, the other three sources were weakly predictive of self-efficacy.
– The authors note that there was no evidence of race/ethnicity as
a moderator of the sources-to-efficacy relationships in STEM
college samples. This suggests that among college students, the
sources are similarly predictive of STEM self-efficacy for nonWhite
and White individuals.