Effect of Students’ Self-Efficacy on their Cognitive Ability at Secondary School Level in Punjab

Abstract

Self-efficacy is one of the most powerful psychological factors that affects each aspect of students' endeavor and cognitive ability. Self-efficacy is the student’s belief in their abilities in this way they like to engage in learning which leads to improved cognitive ability performance across educational domains. Cognitive ability is an individual's mental competency. It refers to such ways as perceiving, meaningful, knowing, conceptualizing, judging, and reasoning. The research was quantitative in nature, and study was used causal-comparative design. The population of the study consisted of 10th- grade secondary school students in Punjab province. The representative sample of the study was selected by using a multistage random sampling method. A total of 3375 students were considered as samples that belonged to three different zones of Punjab namely central, northern and the southern zones. Two instruments Self-efficacy and Cognitive Ability Test (CAT) were used in the research. Cronbach's alpha was used to check the reliability of the questionnaire. The reliability of self-efficacy was 0.89. The data were collected through a survey method. Three expert opinions were include to validate the instrument. The data were analyzed by the descriptive statistical methods; frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, multiple linear regressions, and t-test. The findings of the study revealed that self-efficacy, and student’s cognitive ability were at medium levels, t-test study (6.10) show that male’s self-efficacy is greater than female’s self-efficacy, t-test (6.92) show that the urban self-efficacy is also higher than rural self-efficacy, cognitive ability t-test (1.64) show that the score of males is greater than females, t-test (1.75) show that the score of urban people is greater than that of rural people. The linear regression was applied to examine the effect of self-efficacy and learning styles on students cognitive ability, self-efficacy explained 30% of the total variance in student’s cognitive ability which a good percentage in total achievement. It can be inferred that if self-efficacy is high, it must be help them to increase cognitive ability of the students. If self-efficacy is higher than cognitive ability will be increased. The study findings show that self-efficacy with sub factors significantly and positively effects on students’ cognitive ability. It is concluded that the model of self-efficacy was significant because the overall value is less than 0.05 (p<05).