Autoeficácia, autoconceito e ansiedade em uma avaliação em larga escala e sua relação com o desempenho escolar

Abstract

This work exposes the results of the research entitled “Self-efficacy, self-concept and anxiety in a large scale assessment and their relationship with the school performance”, developed in the Graduate Program in Education of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. The aim of this research was to investigate if the emotional variables “self-efficacy”, “selfconcept” and “anxiety” can assume a critical role for the interpretation of the proficiency of the students evaluated by the assessment program of public education in Minas Gerais State in 2010. For this, I elaborated a questionnaire to measure these emotional variables. The methodology of data analysis occurred in two steps: the first one was the exploratory data analysis and I chose the method of factor loading with Promax rotation; the second step was the confirmatory data analysis, when I used structural equation models. To produce the scores, I chose the model of item response theory of Samejima. With the emotional data I carried out two studies. The first study investigated the relation of the emotional variables and the students’ proficiency when these variables are introduced in the classical linear hierarchical models of proficiency explanation. The results of this study showed that the emotional variables has a great association with the final proficiency of the students, higher than some classical variables like socioeconomic index and school delay, and they might have an important role in the explanation of the associated factors to the school performance and learning. The second study investigated the relation between “anxiety” and “self-efficacy” with socio-demographic and educational variables usually measured in large scale assessment programs. Here, my opinion was for the use of linear hierarchical models too. The results indicate that these emotional variables were influenced by class features in the initial grades of basic education. However, in the final grades of the basic education I observed a change in the results and it's possible to see that the individual features of the students have more influence on the emotional variables. In conclusion, the findings of this research showed that the psychological science is able to take over a critical role in the conceptualization of public policies of education, in the understanding of the learning processes underlying that policy, in the increasing of the support of teachers and in the comprehension of the relation between individual features and the school performance of students.