The Strange Loop of Self-Efficacy and the Value of Focus Groups in Writing Program Assessment

It’s long been presumed that increases in self-efficacy are correlated with other “habits of mind,” including more effective metacognitive strategies that will enable writing skills to transfer to different situations. Similarly, it’s long been understood that high self-efficacy is associated with more productive habits of mind and more positive emotional dispositions towards writing tasks. However, this two-year assessment of College Writing classes a private, mid-sized, urban four-year university complicates these assumptions. By supplementing substantial survey data we the analysis of data collected in focus groups, we found that the development of self-efficacy does not necessarily correlate to the development of more sophisticated epistemological beliefs—beliefs about how learning happens—nor the development of rhetorically-effective “writing dispositions." In short, suggesting the value of focus groups in assessment, we discovered a “strange loop” of self-efficacy in which gains made towards self-efficacy frequently have a unanticipated, complex, and problematic relation to our desired learning outcomes.