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.
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