On the Relationship between Self-Efficacy Biases and Educational Motivation, Affects and Performance of Guidance-School Students of Shiraz

The aim of the present study is to investigate the biases of student's self-efficacy with regard to some external criteria and its impact on educational motivation, affects and performance outcomes. Participants were 273 second-grade guidance-school students (150 female, 123 male) who were selected by cluster random sampling. The instruments were scales about self-efficacy, motivation, affects and sense to school. On the basis of subtraction of a criterion score (yielded by the average value of teacher evaluation, peers evaluation and the student's math performance), students were divided into three self-efficacy judgmental groups, i.e. pessimists, optimists and realists. The results showed that most of the students overestimated their math self-efficacy. Analysis of variance for motivation and affects outcomes showed significant differences between the means of pessimists and realists groups in benefit of the optimists group. Also, all groups were significantly different in math performance. Pessimists group had the highest and the optimists group the lowest scores. The results indicated a relationship between the kind of self-efficacy judgments and educational motivation, affects, and math performance. Due to unrealistic estimates of student's academic efficacy, it is recommended to find a solution for this problem.