Inviting Confidence in School: Invitations as a Critical Source of the Academic Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Entering Middle School Students.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether constructs drawn from invitational theory serve as addi-tional sources of self-efficacy beliefs of students in Grade 6 (N = 468). The hypothesized sources and the invitational constructs each correlated with academic self-efficacy. Invitations, mastery experience, and physiological state predicted the self-efficacy beliefs of boys and of girls. Social persuasions also predicted girls ' self-efficacy. Invitations, mastery experience, and social persuasions predicted the self-efficacy be-liefs of African American students. For White students, invitations and the four hypothesized sources pre-dicted self-efficacy. Findings refine the tenets of social cognitive theory and suggest that invitations act as a powerful fifth source of self-efficacy. Self-Efficacy Beliefs Ample research has documented that students' beliefs about their capabilities to perform aca-demic tasks or to succeed in academic activi-ties—their self-efficacy beliefs—powerfully in-fluence their academic performances (see Bandura, 1997). Students who are confident in