How self-efficacy affects students' performance and pace in self-directed learning with ICT

Due to the fact that not only most Self-Directed Learning (SDL) studies remains discussed at the undergraduate or adult level, but also ICT in education has been positively proved as a compelling factor for the children, a SDL with ICT scenario is described in this paper. In SDL, with or without the assistance or guidance from the classroom teacher, students learn by their own during the learning activity, in which the students will identify their needs, set their goals, take learning missions, and reflect their learning outcome by reviewing their finished learning missions and performance. However, although students' self-efficacy affects how the students own the perception on self-management or goal accomplishments (Ormrod, 2006), limited discussion is found for exploring self-efficacy in SDL with ICT. Therefore, in this study, students are pre-categorized into high and low self-efficacy groups for exploring the effect of self-efficacy for SDL with ICT. As a result, the result shows that students' self-efficacy might not be a crucial factor that affect students' performance or pace, with only a slightly higher gain score on performance is found in this study.