Introduction
Although there are considerable factors that play into academic success, many times social and emotional factors are forgotten about. In recent years there have been steps taken to close the achievement gap between more privileged and disadvantaged students however, many of these efforts have taken place within the school house without looking at what social and emotional factors might affect children in higher poverty schools. The school is only one factor that affects any given student, there are even more “distal levels of the environment” that affect a student; including home life, beliefs, cultural values and the community they live in (Becker & Luthar, 2002). Studies have shown that children with characteristics that indicate learned helplessness and low self-efficacy happen to be poor readers (Butowsky & Willows, 1980). This paper focuses on two specific factors that impact a student’s ability to learn how to read and write, including learned helplessness and self-efficacy and how to help these students on their academic journeys.
Self-Efficacy
One of the keys to student’s motivational and cognitive variables in reading as well as writing is self-efficacy (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007). Self-efficacy is a term coined by Bandura and describes a learner’s perceived capabilities (Bandura, 1997). A learner’s perceived capabilities could be seen as how a 12 year old on a baseball team sees their own ability to bat, or more typically it is how a learner sees their