PB3A

The scholarly publication “Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Motivation in Writing Development” by Frank Pajares and Gio Valiante explores the relationship between a writer’s self-confidence, or rather “self-efficacy” and his or her motivation and performance in school. The authors covered an extensive amount of information, but focused on the major ways that self-efficacy is gained (and broken), the dominate ways of measuring self-efficacy, the various ways in which self-efficacy positively and negatively affects motivation and performance, and the different ways that gender impacts self-efficacy. One of the most striking parts of the paper, to me, was where self-efficacy stems from. The most influential source is previous performance, but “social persuasions” also play a major role. An individual’s self-efficacy is said to be directly linked to his academic performance (Pajares and Valiante 160). In transforming this paper I think it is appropriate to incorporate enhancing self-efficacy in each of the two genres.

For the transformation to an older audience, I am going to prepare a magazine article entitled “6 Ways to Improve Your Self-Confidence” that would perhaps belong in the magazine “Health.” However, the article focused on the impact that self-confidence can have on one’s performance, such as how one’s level of self-efficacy is related to the duration of efforts that individual will put into a project, more so than how to improve one’s self confidence. For this reason, I think a somewhat along the lines of “6 Ways that Improving Your Self-Confidence Will Improve Your Life” may be more fitting—though I am not entirely sure. While I recognize that the latter title is a bit wordy, I’m more concerned with which will work better with the paper that I am transforming. I plan on using one tip from a few of the major topics the paper discusses such as “how is self-efficacy formed,” “how do you assess self-efficacy,” “how are self-efficacy and achievement goal orientations related,” and so on. To add to the “magazine” style format, I may try to tie in my first potential article title (if I do decide to go with the second) as an add-on to my article, perhaps titles “Plus 3 Ways to Improve Your Self-Confidence.”

To transform this to a younger audience, I initially considered the idea of composing some sort of inspiring “self-help” book that was appropriate for a younger audience. And then I remembered, no book. Well, maybe not no book, but it’s probably better as a back up option. While I was home for the weekend, I took some time to look around and see if I could get inspired by anything. I found some old mad-libs books, and decided that was a pretty cool genre to try to manipulate. Part of the article I read mentioned that self-efficacy can arise from a number of sources: primarily from prior experiences, but also from “social persuasions.” Thus, I thought it was only appropriate to transform this into a genre where social persuasions can occur. The activity book consists of a series of pages, each with its own story, with blank lines to fill in words to personalize the activity—underneath each blank the book specifies the type of word needed (i.e. adjective, verb, etc.). I would tailor the pages to promote self-confidence amongst friends, so perhaps instead of a blank needing an adjective to complete the sentence, I would specify that it needed to be a positive adjective. I also think it could be beneficial to include some pages that are intended for an individual to complete on his own, and others that are meant for friends to complete about other.