Stress, Self-efficacy, and Student Self-assessment in the Introductory Economics Classroom
Keywords:
stress,, self-efficacy, predictive calibration, active inference, economicsAbstract
This paper examines the relationships between college students’ personal stress and academic self-efficacy on their self-assessment of learning. Students enrolled in an introductory economics course were asked to predict their score on a regularly scheduled exam. Each student’s self-assessment of learning was measured as the difference between the student’s predicted score and the student’s actual performance. Students were also administered a psychometric instrument to measure their individual levels of personal stress and
academic self-efficacy across several perceptual domains. A regression model was estimated to examine the moderating effects of stress and self-efficacy on predictive calibration – the degree to which a student accurately predicted their test performance. The results indicated that high levels of stress from in-class academic experiences resulted in more accurate predictive calibration scores while measured self-efficacy had no significant effect, ceteris paribus. The estimated effect of personal in-class stress is consistent with the implications of active inference theory.
References
Böke, B. N., Mills, D. J., Mettler, J. & Heath, N. L. (2019). Stress and coping patterns of university students. Journal of College Student Development, 60(1), 85-103.
Bol, L. & Hacker, D. J. (2012, July 9). Calibration research: Where do we go from here? Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00229
Busom, I., Lopez-Mayan, C., & Panadés, J. (2017). Students’ persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles. Journal of Economic Education, 48(2), 74-92.
Caplan, B. (2001). What makes people think like economists? Journal of Law and Economics, 44(2), 395-426.
Caplan, B. (2002). Systematically biased beliefs about economics. Economic Journal, 112(479), 433-458.
Fitzgerald, T., L. Gruppen, C. White, & Davis, W. (1997). Medical student self-assessment abilities: Accuracy and calibration [Conference paper]. American Educational Research Association Conference, Chicago, IL, United States.
Friston, K. J. (2018). Active inference and cognitive consistency. Psychological Inquiry, 29(2), 67-73.
Friston, K., FitzGerald, T., Rigoli, F., Schwartenbeck, P., O’Doherty, J. & Pezzulo, G. (2016). Active inference and learning. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, 862-879.
Friston, K., FitzGerald, T., Rigoli, F., Schwartenbeck, P. & Pezzulo, G. (2017). Active inference: A process theory. Neural Computation, 29(1), 1-49.
Gillström, Ä. & Rönnberg, J. (1995). Comprehension calibration and recall prediction accuracy of texts: Reading skill, reading strategies, and effort. Journal of Educational Psychology, 87(4), 545-558.
Goffe, W. L. (2013). Initial misconceptions in macro principles classes [Unpublished manuscript]. http://cook.rfe.org/Misconceptions.pdf
Grimes, P. W. & Niss, J. (1991). Economic understanding and student success in a business curriculum. Journal of Education for Business, 66(5), 309-313.
Grimes, P. W. (2002). The overconfident principles of economics student: An examination of a metacognitive skill. The Journal of Economic Education, 33(1), 15-30.
Grimes, P. W. & Binder, A. D. (2021). Student stress and academic achievement in introductory college economics. College Student Journal, 55(3), 338-346.
Grimes, P. W., Sanderson, P. L., & Ching, G. H. (1997). Student study choices in the principles of economics: A case study of computer usage. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 16(1), 65-82.
Gutierrez, A. P. & Price, A. F. (2017). Calibration between undergraduate students’ prediction of actual performance: The role of gender and performance attributions. The Journal of Experimental Education, 85(3), 486-500.
Hellmich, S. N. (2019). Are people trained in economics “different,” and if so, why? A literature review. The American Economist, 64(2), 246-268.
Horgan, D. (1990). Student predictions of test grades: Calibration and metacognition [Conference paper]. American Educational Research Association Conference, Boston, MA, United States.
Kader, A. A. (2016). Debilitating and facilitating test anxiety and student motivation and achievement in principles of microeconomics. International Review of Economics Education, 23, 40-46.
Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.
Lichtenstein, S. & Fischhoff, B. (1977). Do those who know more also know more about how much they know? Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 20(2), 159-183.
Luccasen III, R. A. & Thomas, M. K. (2014). Monetary incentives versus class credit: Evidence from a large classroom trust experiment. Economic Letters, 123(2), 232-235.
Maki, R. (1995). Accuracy of metacomprehension judgments for questions of varying importance levels. American Journal of Psychology, 108(3), 327–44.
McQuade, K. (2019, August 22). What I’ve learned from teaching the ‘Snowflake Generation’ about trauma. Time. https://time.com/5659268/trigger-warnings-snowflake-generation/
Nowell, C. & Alston, R. M. (2007). I thought I got an A! Overconfidence across the economics curriculum. Journal of Economic Education, 38(2), 131-142.
Parsons, R. & Mamo, M. (2017). The source and impact of student preconceptions in economics principles classes. International Review of Economics Education, 25, 15-24.
Raviv, S. (2018, December 26). The man who explained everything. Wired, 96-105.
Russo, J. E. & Chaxel, A. (2017). Cognitive consistency theories. Oxford Bibliographies, 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0195
Salazar, L. R. & Hayward, S. L. (2018). An examination of college students’ problem-solving self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy, motivation, test performance, and expected grade in introductory-level economics courses. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 16(3), 217-240.
Weaver, C. & Bryant, D. (1995). Monitoring and comprehension: The role of text difficulty in metamemory for narrative and expository text. Memory and Cognition, 23(1), 12-22.
Yagoda, B. (2016, December 4). Who you calling ‘Snowflake’? The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/12/04/who-you-calling-snowflake/
Zajacova, A., Lynch, S. M., Epenshade, T. J. (2005). Self-efficacy, stress, and academic success in college. Research in Higher Education, 46, 677-706.
Zima, M. (2019, December 2). Are we a generation of snowflakes? The Boar.https://theboar.org/2018/12/generation-snowflakes/
