How Can Encouragement Increase Persistence in Computing?
Anyone who participates in sports or physical training knows the positive effects of encouragement. Research in sports medicine finds substantial improvements in effort and persistence result from frequent exhortations like, “Great job!” and “Keep going; I know you can do it!” This type of communication from trusted sources motivates people to work at a task harder and longer (Bandura, 1997). It promotes career advancement. It equalizes retention of men and women computer science majors, and even increases women’s enrollment, because women more often than men say they entered computer science because a teacher, family member, or friend encouraged them to do it (Cohoon, 2006). Therefore, encouragement can be a powerful tool in an overall effort to bring gender balance to computing. Encouragement seems to work by increasing the recipient’s self-efficacy (belief in one’s competence to succeed at a particular task). Self-efficacy can be increased in other ways too. For example, both observing someone perceived to be similar to one’s self succeed at the task and experiencing one’s own success at the task contribute to belief in one’s capacity to perform that task. The vicarious method and the verbal persuasion method (encouragement) seem to be particularly effective for increasing the likelihood that women will engage, persist, and put effort into tasks in domains like computing. |
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ENCOURAGING WORDS COUNTER LOW CONFIDENCEEncouragement increases self-efficacy, which is the belief in one’s ability to successfully perform a task. Because we are more likely to engage in tasks that we believe we can perform successfully, encouragement may be especially useful in male-stereotyped fields such as computing, which are marked by men’s apparent over-confidence and women’s apparent under-confidence. In this context, credible words of encouragement from supervisors and instructors increase women’s entry and persistence by raising their self-efficacy. |
Resources
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.
- Bandura, A. & Cervone, D. (1983). Self-evaluative and self-efficacy mechanism governing the motivational effects of goal systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(5), 1017-1028.
- Maehr, M. L., Karabenick, S. A.,& Urdan, T. C. (2008). Social Psychological Perspectives. United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
- Schunk, D. & Zimmerman, B. (Eds.). (2007). Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning: Theory, Research, and Applications. New York: Routledge.
- Zeldin, A., Britner, S. and Pajares, F. (2008). A comparative study of the self-efficacy beliefs of successful men and women in mathematics, science, and technology careers. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(9), 1036-1058.
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Author: J. McGrath Cohoon