Summary Perceived self-efficacy represents an optimistic sense of personal competence that seems to be a pervasive phenomenon accounting for motivation and accomplishments in human beings. The General Self-Efficacy scale, developed to measure this construct at the broadest level, has been adapted to many languages. The psychometric properties of this instrument is examined among 19,120 participants from 25 countries. The main research question is whether the measure is configurally equivalent across cultures, that is, whether it corresponds to only one dimension. The findings confirm this assumption and suggest the globality of the underlying construct. They also point to a number of cross-cultural differences that merit further investigation.

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Is General Self-Efficacy a Universal Construct?1

This report examines cross-cultural differences in response style regarding the use of rating scales Subjects were high school students 944 from Sendai (Japan), 1,357 from Taipei (Taiwan), 687 from Edmonton and Calgary (Canada), and 2,174 from the Minneapolis metropolitan area and Fairfax County, Virginia Responses to fifty-seven 7-point Likert-type scales were analyzed The Japanese and Chinese students were more likely than the two North American groups to use the midpoint on the scales, the U S subjects were more likely than the other three groups to use the extreme values Within each cultural group, endorsement of individualism was positively related to the use of extreme values and negatively related to the use of the midpoint These small, albeit statistically significant, differences in response styles generally did not alter cross-cultural comparisons of item means

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Response Style and Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Rating Scales Among East Asian and North American Students

The cultural construction of self and emotion: Implications for social behavior.

College student motivation is a persistent and persuasive problem for faculty and staff at all levels of postsecondary education. Faculty at community colleges, comprehensive universities, small liberal arts colleges, and private and public research universities all bemoan the lack of student motivation. The questions that college faculty and staff raise include: why don’t the students seem to care about their work, why don’t they seem more interested in the disciplinary content of the courses, why do they only care about their grades but not learning, why don’t they try very hard, why don’t they study very much, why do they procrastinate and try to study for an exam at the last minute, or try to write a paper the day before it is due, why can’t they be more organized and plan their work better, and why don’t they learn or perform very well. All of these issues can be partially explained by a motivation and self-regulation perspective on student learning in the college classroom. Of course, there are other models of college student cognition and learning that are relevant, but in this chapter we will focus on motivational and self-regulatory constructs. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of current research on college student motivation and self-regulated learning that should provide some insights into these general problems.

Student Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning in the College Classroom

A meta-analysis of published cross-cultural studies of self-enhancement reveals pervasive and pronounced differences between East Asians and Westerners. Across 91 comparisons, the average cross-cultural effect was d = .84. The effect emerged in all 30 methods, except for comparisons of implicit self-esteem. Within cultures, Westerners showed a clear self-serving bias (d = .87), whereas East Asians did not (d = -.01), with Asian Americans falling in between (d = .52). East Asians did self-enhance in the methods that involved comparing themselves to average but were self-critical in other methods. It was hypothesized that this inconsistency could be explained in that these methods are compromised by the "everyone is better than their group's average effect" (EBTA). Supporting this rationale, studies that were implicated by the EBTA reported significantly larger self-enhancement effect for all cultures compared to other studies. Overall, the evidence converges to show that East Asians do not self-enhance.

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In Search of East Asian Self-Enhancement

STIGLER, JAMES W.; SMITH, SHEILA; and MAO, LIAN-WEN. The Self-Perception of Competence by Chinese Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1259-1270. This study explores cultural differences in self-perceptions of competence between Chinese and American elementary school children. Harter's Perceived Competence Scale for Children was administered to 714 fifth-grade children in Taiwan, and results were compared with American studies that have employed the same scale. Most striking is the nearly perfect replication of the factorial validity of the 4 subscales in the Chinese sample. Also similar across the 2 groups is a high correlation between perceived cognitive competence and actual achievement in school. However, interesting cultural differences are also found. Chinese children tend to underrate their competence compared to American children, except in the social domain where higher ratings are judged to reflect a different social reality. Judging oneself as "important" to one's peers loaded on the cognitive subscale in the Chinese sample, but on the social subscale for the Americans. Chinese children also differentiated satisfaction with oneself from the desire to change for the better.

Sheila Smith

Papers

The self-perception of competence by Chinese children.