C.D.S. Education
Competence, Distinction, Success
C.D.S. Education
Competence, Distinction, Success
C.D.S. Education is owned and run by Dr. Claire Spicer, in Melbourne, Australia. Claire is an experienced teacher of students with learning difficulties, behavioural issues and those considered gifted.
Claire has extensive qualifications including a Bachelors degree majoring in psychology, a post graduate in secondary education and a Master in Education majoring in educational psychology. Claire's PhD investigated the self-efficacy of non-gifted and gifted adolescent students. The thesis assessed students’ perception of their written English skills self-efficacy in addition to their creativity and motivation.
Currently Claire is completing her Masters in Counselling, training in childhood and adolescent counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy.
Self-efficacy is a belief. It is defined as the beliefs in one’s capabilities to organise and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy beliefs have three main dimensions. First is the magnitude or level of task difficulty. A student, for example, may have high self-efficacy for an easy task but low self-efficacy for a task they perceive as difficult. The second dimension is generality. Generality refers to the breadth of the domain to which the judgements apply. For example, a student may have high reading self-efficacy and therefore the student may feel that whenever reading was a necessary component of a task, they would be able to complete the task successfully. Finally, self-efficacy beliefs can be held strongly or weakly. Strongly held beliefs are less likely to be challenged by a few unsuccessful experiences than are weakly held self-efficacy beliefs.
Self-efficacy beliefs are an important factor in education, as they define the ways in which students attempt tasks and hence, learn. Self-efficacy beliefs affect student learning in three distinct ways. Firstly, it influences the students’ goal setting and determination to succeed. Self-efficacy also affects the effort students administer on a task and finally, self-efficacy influences the logic student’s use when deciding to become involved in a task.
Therefore, a student with low levels of self-efficacy may set lower goals and relinquish a task once it becomes difficult. Students with higher levels of self-efficacy may set more challenging goals, persevere when stuck and take more risks with their learning.
Verbally gifted students are those described as having a superior linguistic symbol system and the ability to express their complex thoughts into words (Bailey, 1996; Silverman, 1998). These students are able to comprehend subtle differences between word rhythms, inflection and meter (Bainbridge, 2000) and can easily differentiate between the different functions of language (Bailey, 1996). By contrast, non-verbally gifted students think in pictures and not words (Silverman, 2002). The pictures can be like still photographs or similar to mini moving films. They require time to process verbal or written information into a ‘picture’, switching off in order to do so. As such, these students may have gaps in their knowledge as the teacher continues talking. Once the visual representation is complete; these gifted students can manipulate and even rotate the image in their mind and the learning is permanent (Silverman, 2002).