Locus of Control and Academic Self-Efficacy in University Students: The Effects of Self-Concepts

Psychology Paper
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Psychology Paper
This paper will summarize and comment on the study “Locus of Control and Academic Self-efficacy in University Students: The Effects of Self-concepts” by Elisabetta Sagone and Maria Elvira De Caroli. Sagone & Caroli (2014) investigate: (1) whether university students who adopt the internal locus of control also convey a positive depiction of present and future self-concepts; (2) if university students who recognize themselves as highly competent in their studies express a positive depiction of present and future self-concepts; and (3) whether university students who view themselves as academically able adopt the internal locus of control. The authors used a sample of 267 Italian university students (96 men and 171 women) aged between 18 and 26 years. They divided them into three groups concerning their study courses (psychology, medicine, and law). They employed the locus of control of behavior scale to evaluate the students’ internal and external locus of control, the academic self-efficacy scale (which was created for the first time by the authors) to explore students’ perceived self-efficacy in the academic context, and the semantic differential technique to analyze the representation of present and future self-concepts. They analyzed their results using the SPPS 15 program and discovered that: (1) university students who adopted the internal locus of control conveyed a positive depiction of themselves both in the present and the future; (2) university students who recognized themselves as highly competent in their studies demonstrated a positive depiction of present and future self-concepts; and (3) university students who viewed themselv...