Academic self efficacy: chance to reflect about high school

Abstract

This article is dedicated to a reflection on high school related issues and aims to understand these through the analysis of the perceptions of high school students regarding academic self efficacy construct. This construct refers to the beliefs of the student's ability to organize and execute courses of actions required to attain designated types of intellectual and learning performance. Through a scale of 31 items on 7-point Likert format, we analyzed the perceptions of 165 high school students, at one private school and two public schools located in the state of Sao Paulo. Of these, 116 are females and 48 males, age range between 14 (18.5%) to 24 (0.6%) years. It discusses the five items with the highest and lowest average scores. The descriptive analysis revealed a high sense of academic self efficacy. We discuss our data pointing out the need for additional research and reflections to increase the understanding of the results presented here.