Abstract:

Self-efficacy, the belief in one’s ability to perform specific tasks, has long been a central topic in personality psychology. Introduced by Bandura (1977), the concept plays a crucial role in personality development, as numerous studies have shown its direct link to performance, persistence, and overall well-being. Using data from the PISA 2022 assessment, this study examines how math self-efficacy is related to math achievement among four European educational systems: Romania, Spain, Finland, and Estonia. In addition to the traditional sense of math self-efficacy, with two different constructs of math self-efficacy, refers to perceptions of math self-efficacy in both classical and applied mathematics tasks, and 21th century math self-efficacy, refers to perceptions of math self-efficacy when it comes to modeling, reasoning, interpreting, and solving digital math problems. This research is among the first to compare how these two perceptions of math self-efficacy relate to math achievement in systems that differ substantially with respect to their performance levels. The four countries in this study—Romania, Spain, Finland, and Estonia—were selected because they offer a balanced comparison of Europe: Romania as a low-performing country, Spain as an average-performing country, and Finland and Estonia as top-performing Nordic or Baltic countries that are reasonably alike. Consequently, the methodology allows us to study both forms of self-efficacy while looking across different types of educational structures, as well as contrasting socio-economic contexts. The analyses of this research were conducted using R software and EdSurvey, which provides a means to examine the data while taking into account plausible values, sampling weights, and Jackknife repetitions. In our analyses, we have conducted an examination of the descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression models while controlling for the influence of students' socio-economic status (ESCS), as well as, gender, and math anxiety. Our use of multilevel modeling (students nested within schools) allows for the examination of how self-efficacy predictions differ across students from schools with different types of school context, as well as, across schools with different socio-economic compositions of students. Additionally, this research provides a unique perspective on how students from minority subpopulations within both Romania and Spain (defined using the national sampling strata) have different perceptions of math self-efficacy than do students from the majority populations, and allows us to test whether the two types of math self-efficacy operate in a different fashion across different regional and language subgroups within Europe. Results show cross-national and cross-cultural variations in the relationship between different measures of self-efficacy and mathematical achievement. Cultures and educational systems differ in how they prioritize the development of self-efficacy in schools, leading to varying levels of mathematical self-efficacy and, consequently, mathematical achievement. This research has provided evidence of the importance of examining how different types of self-efficacy predict performance in mathematics across various educational systems and of the importance of including minority populations in studies of cross-national assessment research.

Keywords:

Mathematics self-efficacy, Mathematics achievement, PISA 2022, Cross-national comparison, Minority–majority differences.