Since it is unlikely that students in the traditional labs had greater abilities in the areas
questioned on the self-efficacy survey, their confidence must have increased due to some
other reason. One possibility is that success –or lack of failure in this case – bred overconfidence.
Students in the traditional labs never had to grapple with failure or confusion,
so they were never made aware of the difficulties of actually writing lab reports or asking
meaningful experimental questions. Self efficacy is by definition subjective; it depends on a
person’s perceptions of their own ability (Bandura, 1986). In our case, actually doing the
activities described in the self-efficacy survey, such as explaining the design of a biology
experiment to another person and receiving critical feedback, some of it inevitably negative,
would obviously bring about a more realistic impression of that ability. We propose that
exposure to the actual challenge of attempting and sometimes failing in these activities