In the educational sphere, self-efficacy refers to the beliefs students hold in their capabilities to accomplish tasks required for learning.  Students with high self-efficacy persevere longer, search for deeper meaning across learning tasks, report lower anxiety, and achieve higher at school (Bandura, 1997; Multon, Brown, & Lent, 1991; Pajares & Schunk, 2005).  Students’ self-efficacy has been shown to predict achievement outcomes in diverse academic areas such as mathematics, science, and writing (Pajares, 1996; Pajares & Urdan, 2006).

According to Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory, individuals develop their self-efficacy by attending to four sources of capability-related information. The most powerful of these sources is hypothesized to be mastery experiences, or individuals’ interpretations of their past performances. Vicarious experiences, which involve observing the successes and failures of social models, also inform self-efficacy. The third source of self-efficacy comes from the social persuasions people receive from others through evaluative feedback. Finally, physiological and affective states, including stress, fatigue, anxiety, and mood, can also influence perceptions of capability. Individuals rely on information from these four sources in various degree according to numerous contextual factors.

Researchers who have investigated the sources of students’ academic self-efficacy beliefs have tended to focus on secondary and post-secondary students. Results generally indicate that mastery experience is the strongest predictor of students’ self-efficacy (Usher & Pajares, 2008). Few researchers have investigated the manner in which children rely on the four sources of efficacy information during the development of their educational self-view. Still fewer have investigated the sources of self-efficacy in European contexts, where teaching practices vary among regions and differ sometimes markedly from U.S. and other national contexts. Children may develop their academic efficacy beliefs in ways that reveal cultural emphases on one or more of the sources described above (Bandura, 1997). Gender may also play a role in how students attend to efficacy-relevant information, but those who have included elementary-aged students in studies of the sources have not examined gender differences (i.e., Pajares et al., 2007), which may be especially pronounced in mathematics (Duru-Bellat, 1995).

The purpose of the present study is to examine how elementary school students (Grades 4 and 5) in France and in the U.S. develop and modify their efficacy beliefs in mathematics across a school year. We selected mathematics because it is a critical academic domain in which high expectations are placed on students in both national contexts. Variations in pedagogical practices in these cultural contexts could account for differences in self-efficacy (Pajares, 2007). The primary research questions guiding the study are: (a) What is the nature of change in students’ mathematics self-efficacy and its sources across the academic year in both contexts? (b) What is the independent contribution of each of the four sources to the prediction of mathematics self-efficacy? How does this contribution compare nationally?  (c) What, if any, gender differences are present among the variables investigated in the two contexts?

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