A Middle School Drop: Consistent Gender Differences in Students' Self-Efficacy. Working Paper

Academic self-efficacy is a student's belief about their ability to learn or to perform within a school environment. This paper captures differential trends in academic self-efficacy by gender using self-efficacy survey data from five large districts in California from the 2014-15 through 2017-18 school years. We find that female students report significantly higher self-efficacy in elementary school compared to males. In middle school, students' self-efficacy declines for both genders; however, this drop is substantially greater for females, leading to significantly lower levels of reported self-efficacy for females than males from middle school onward. Despite large differences in average self-efficacy, this gendered pattern of drop-off occurs consistently across racial, socioeconomic, and academic subgroups. Average self-efficacy also varies significantly among schools; however, school demographics and culture and climate, as reported by students, are not strongly associated with the average female-male self-efficacy gap. Looking at how the general measure of academic self-efficacy corresponds with test scores, we find the drops in self-efficacy are most pronounced for low scoring students, and that changes in grade-to-grade test scores modestly correlate with changes in general academic self-efficacy.