Research in Education No. 82 60 Can contrived success affect self-efﬁcacy among junior high school students? Kazuo Mori Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology Akitoshi Uchida Shinshu University I t has been known that self-efﬁcacy and scholastic achievement are closely related. For example, Shell, Colvin, and Bruning (1995) reported that self-efﬁcacy ratings and reading and writing achievement scores among fourth grade, seventh grade, and high school students were highly corre- lated. Marsh, Roche, Pajares, and Miller (1997) found that self-efﬁcacy in mathematics among junior and senior high school students had a strong effect on their actual math achievement in school. Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli (1996) showed that children’s self-efﬁcacy beliefs including academic self-efﬁcacy, social self-efﬁcacy, and self-regulatory efﬁ- cacy, were related to academic achievement either directly and via other variables such as parental academic aspirations and children’s prosocial behaviors. However, those studies were only correlational, and whether the relationship between self-efﬁcacy and scholastic achievement is causal or not has not been properly examined experimentally. A high level of self-efﬁcacy may well be a result of high scores in an achievement test, rather than a cause. There are even some studies that failed to ﬁnd a relationship between self-efﬁcacy and school achievement (Garduno, 2001; Norwich, 1994). Our recent review (Uchida & Mori, 2004) revealed that, although there were more than 50 papers concerning ‘self-efﬁcacy’ and ‘junior high school’ published in psychological journals from 1993 to 2003, according to the database PsycINFO; no research directly targeted the causative relationship experimentally. Ever since Bandura introduced the notion of self-efﬁcacy (Bandura, 1977), almost no studies have actually demonstrated that success promotes self-efﬁcacy in a causal way by means of an experimental approach using junior high school students. The most recent study by Bandura and his Italian colleagues (Caprara, Fida, Vecchione, Del Bove, Vecchio, Barbaranelli, & Bandura, 2008) conducted a longitudinal investigation on the developmental course of perceived efﬁcacy for self-regulated learning and its contribution to academic achievement using 412 Italian students. However, it showed only co-relative contributions of various factors. They did not quote any single study that demonstrated the causal relationship of academic successes and self-efﬁcacy in an experimental paradigm.