Personal factors affecting the generality of academic self-efficacy judgments: Gender, ethnicity, and relative expertise

The generality of academic self-efficacy judgments of groups of students with different personal characteristics was compared, with a sample drawn from a previous study (M. Bong, 1997), Six Ist-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models of different generality were fitted separately to each group. When those models demonstrated an acceptable fit, 2nd-order CFA models were tested. The boys demonstrated more comparable strengths of self-efficacy across academic domains than the girls, who more clearly distinguished between their verbal and math self-efficacy. The Hispanic students made a clearer distinction between Spanish self-efficacy and self-efficacy in other verbal subjects than did the non-Hispanic students. Across verbal and math domains, the students who were in advanced placement classes demonstrated more conservative generality of their self-efficacy judgments than those in regular classes. It appears that students make more context-specific judgments of their academic self-efficacy as they gain increased expertise in the given academic domain.