Empirical Research Of Influencing Learning Self-efficacy For College Students By Virtual Community

Since the concept of self-efficacy emerged, it has received a high degree of attention and widespread concern from researchers of many different fields. As the important subjective factor to automatic learning and learning motive of students, learning self-efficacy has become a crucial sector to influence academic achievement and educational quality. With the deepening of educational revolution and development of educational informationization, it has become a more and more intensive topic for educational researchers to promote learning self-efficacy of students by informational way.This research has discussed the influence on learning self-efficacy by virtual community and verified it, for the example of English study. We has probed into theories about self-efficacy and learning self-efficacy deeply and analyzed its influencing factors. We has put the function and intension of virtual community in order, dug the effective factors to improve learning self-efficacy and constructed a theoretic model to promote learning self-efficacy by virtual community combining with collaborative learning theory. We designed an English learning community and put it into the process of participants'study. We prepared the English Learning Self-Efficacy Scale on the basis of existing achievements according to the fact of this research. We tested the effects to improve learning self-efficacy by virtual community using nonequivalent group between the experimental group and contrastive group and pretest and posttest of multi-group quasi-experiment methodology.The research has showed following results:(1) Differences among learning self-efficacy of freshmen are not evident. (2) Differences exist between different sexualities. Girls'self-efficacy level is higher than boys'. (3) Differences exist inside sexualities. The differences inside girls'self-efficacy are not evident. The differences inside boys'self-efficacy are relatively evident. (4) English learning self-efficacy of university students emerges a positive correlation with their academic achievements. (5) Virtual community is effective to promote learning self-efficacy as the experimental intervention, because the posttest data shows the self-efficacy level of experimental group has become raised compared with it in pretest and it's higher than contrastive group while it is lower than contrastive group in pretest. (6) Students with higher self-efficacy levels behave more active in virtual community. This illustrates that self-efficacy affects the participation of students in virtual community. (7) Most students consider that virtual community has an advanced function to their learning self-confidence. They have acquired a sense of accomplishment not available in the classroom by encouragements from companions, help from teachers, approval of achievements and awards from community. Thus it's more conductive to wake up a positive perception of the effectiveness.