Is it all about what we believe?

Imagine a learner logging into an online course. They open the assignment, read the instructions, and close the tab without trying it. They have not answered a question or received a failing grade. Nothing seems to have gone wrong. Yet they may already be giving up because they have already reached one conclusion: “I cannot do this.”

Something similar happened in competitive running before 1954, when the four-minute mile was widely considered beyond human reach. Then, on May 6, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds (Roger Bannister, n.d.). Other runners soon followed, crossing a barrier that had stood there for decades. John Landy broke Bannister’s record 46 days later (Sport Australia Hall of Fame, n.d.). Human bodies had not suddenly changed. What changed was the belief about what was possible.

Albert Bandura called this belief self-efficacy: your judgment of whether you can perform the actions needed to achieve a particular result (Bandura, 1977).1 According to expectancy-value theory, people’s “choice, persistence, and performance can be explained by their beliefs about how well they will do on the activity and the extent to which they value the activity” (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000, p. 68). Self-efficacy is closely related to the first belief: whether people believe they can perform the activity successfully.2 A learner may care deeply about a subject and still make no attempt if they expect to fail. From the outside, that inaction can look like laziness or a lack of skill. We are likely to respond with more practice or stricter accountability, yet neither will necessarily change the belief holding the learner back. Before choosing a solution, we need to understand what helps learners strengthen their self-efficacy.

Building evidence is the key

Bandura identified four sources from which learners form beliefs about their capabilities: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states.3 Each of them points to a different way learning design can strengthen or weaken self-efficacy.

The first is to help the learner succeed at least once (i.e., performance accomplishment). The task should be challenging enough to count, but manageable enough to complete. As Bandura noted, succeeding at an easy task “provides no new information” (1977, p. 201). A learner can revise a perceived ceiling only by completing work that once seemed beyond reach. This raises a practical design question: Is the task designed to give a learner the right level of challenge as well as a genuine chance to succeed?

The second is watching someone like them succeed, which Bandura calls a vicarious experience. The choice of model seems to matter. Bandura argued, from studies of people overcoming fears, that observers gain more from watching someone overcome difficulty through determined effort than from the “facile performances” of adept models (Bandura, 1977, p. 197). Later classroom experiments found this specifically true for learners who are struggling with something new (Schunk, Hanson, & Cox, 1987). The same principle should guide our design. Seeing the polished work of someone who always succeeds may not make the goal feel more attainable to a struggling learner. Seeing a peer struggle, adjust, and eventually succeed may make the goal feel within reach.

Verbal persuasion is on Bandura’s list too. However, as he suggested, it is “widely used because of its ease and ready availability” (Bandura, 1977, p. 198), not because of its effectiveness. The confidence created by encouragement alone is fragile. A single experience of failure can readily extinguish it through “disconfirming experiences” (p. 198). Therefore, encouragement is the easiest form of support to offer, but its effects may also be the quickest to fade.

As you design instruction, consider what your learners believe is beyond their reach, and ask whether your design reinforces or challenges that belief. Teaching does more than present content. It also shapes what learners believe they can do.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Roger Bannister. (n.d.). Chronology: Key moments in eight years as an athlete. Retrieved September 12, 2026, from https://www.sirrogerbannister.com/athletics-career

Schunk, D. H., Hanson, A. R., & Cox, P. D. (1987). Peer-model attributes and children’s achievement behaviors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(1), 54–61.

Sport Australia Hall of Fame. (n.d.). John Landy. Retrieved September 12, 2026, from https://sahof.org.au/hall-of-fame-member/john-landy/

Wigfield, A., & Eccles, J. S. (2000). Expectancy–value theory of achievement motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1015

  1. Bandura also treated self-efficacy as specific, not as a general supply of confidence that people either have or lack. We can feel capable of explaining a concept to our students and completely incapable of repairing our car. Even within one subject, we may feel ready to describe a study but not to conduct its statistical analysis. The task, its difficulty, and the setting all matter. ↩

  2. Bandura separated efficacy expectations, the belief that one can accomplish a task, from outcome expectancies, the belief that a given action will lead to a given outcome, and argued that expectancy-value theorists had modeled the outcome expectancies. The expectancy-value theorists stated that they measure “individuals’ own expectations for success, rather than their outcome expectations,” so their expectancy construct “is more similar to Bandura’s efficacy expectation construct than it is to the outcome expectancy construct” (2000, p. 71). ↩

  3. Learners also use physical sensations as information about their capabilities (Bandura, 1977). What matters is how they interpret those sensations. A racing heart before a difficult task might be read as excitement, or as evidence that the task is beyond them. The same physical response can therefore strengthen or weaken self-efficacy. ↩