Perspective Chapter: Self-Efficacy and Cognitive Distortion in the Learning Environment

Abstract

Increasing demands for educational institutions to provide reliable measures of student success and student satisfaction have accelerated the way education systems worldwide have transformed their educational missions and mandates regarding the learning environment. However, guaranteeing such measures of assurance of learning is still a challenge since there is no clear-cut definition that fully articulates the wide range of expected academic outcomes associated with the learning environment. Despite this, various studies have shown that faculty perceptions and beliefs about the learning environment can influence learners extracting meaning from their learning experiences. Although these studies have provided vital information for carving a path to the best possible education for learners, they focus only on faculty and the innate characteristics that affect student learning. They place little emphasis on the ability of students to define and achieve goals based on knowing that their own choice-making, problem-solving, self-advocacy, internal locus of control, self-awareness, and self-knowledge as dispositions to them actively learning. Consequently, this chapter explores, via an analytic literature review, the psychological and psychosocial elements underpinning the Inputs-Environment-Outcomes model of the learning environment. Particularly, it explores character education and academic performance in terms of the concepts of social competence, social perception, self-efficacy, and cognition.

1. Introduction

Defining the learning environment is a very complex task due to its many interacting components. Generally, the learning environment, to some people refers to the social, psychological, or psychosocial environment in which learning occurs. To others, it is an environment where a combination of conditions, forces, and external stimuli impact learning in a specific moment [1]. Yet, many others say that regardless of the definition used, the learning environment is one of the most important factors of learning which affects both motivation for learning and learning outcomes. As such, a learning environment requires both leadership and management to provide the best possible education for learners. Therefore, both leadership and management are concepts pivotal to the organization and efficient functioning of educational institutions.

Though the importance of leadership and management in an educational environment cannot be disputed, a seemingly controversial overlap in developing and maintaining successful educational management systems surrounds the use of student evaluation surveys (SETs) as a source to gauge the quality of the learning environment. Current literature suggests that there is a lack of agreement and competing perspectives among education providers, faculty, and students regarding the fairness and validity of SETs. A key point of contention raised in literature dealing with the use of SET surveys is that a large volume of faculty tends to believe that student evaluations are flawed as guides for evaluating staff performance and making decisions about the tenure and promotion of academic staff. They believe that it is most likely that students give ratings based on the likeability of their lecturers and whether they have passed or failed previous courses. Staffers contend that students entering college and university come with diverse learning and support needs and though the processes of the learning environment affect student achievement, and it is important to receive feedback from students about their experiences in the environment, lecturers themselves are not rated holistically and fairly.

It is assumed by some lecturers that when students speak of their negative experiences in the learning environment, they inevitably end up providing a response that most likely reflects some type of causal attribution. For example, it is believed that students tend to attribute a cause to their experience by either describing what they believe to have triggered a negative response or behavior, or they give a reason for their perception by describing what they were hoping to experience or encounter in the learning environment.

In the eyes of faculty, these attributions often amount to mere attempts to shift responsibility for negative personal outcomes from the sense of self to sources that are less central. With respect to management, some faculty believe that policy makers construe that these alleged attributions are multifaceted and can be differentiated as occurring internal or external, intentional or unintentional, specific or global, stable or unstable, and even controllable or uncontrollable. Hence, in the absence of psychometrically sound and reliable assessment techniques to measure attribution error, it is highly probable that lecturers were probably interpreting the accounts of students from the biased perspective that students are inclined to formulate post hoc excuses and justifications for any negative experiences they encounter in the learning environment.

To some faculty, such a view is a signal to them that management envisions the learning environment as one where faculty take responsibility for the contextual factors in their own actions or non-actions that lead to students having negative attitudes toward the learning environment rather than engaging in ‘but it was not my fault’ mentality that they themselves often associated with learners. This apparent tendency for both learners and facilitators of learning to engage in the ‘it’s not my fault’ dilemma may be a result of self-efficacy; which is the belief in one’s own ability, and cognitive distortions; which is a state where habitual ways of thinking function to support core beliefs and assumptions by generalizing, deleting, and/or distorting internal and external stimuli, that all individuals bring to the learning environment. However, faculty tends to believe that it is mainly the self-efficacy and the cognitive distortions that students bring to the learning environment that are not factored into student responses to SETs that affect them the most, and thus it is important to know how students are experiencing the learning environment given their own self-determined behaviors if student evaluation surveys are to have real meaning.

According to the literature, cognitive distortions as a generalization relate to inaccurate or biased ways of attending to or conferring meaning upon experiences. Essentially, these distortions may be primary or secondary self-serving cognitive distortions. Primary distortions pertain to self-centered attitudes and beliefs in one’s own views, expectations, needs, rights, immediate feelings, and desires to the point where the legitimate views, and expectations of others are completely disregarded. In contrast, secondary distortions consist of rationalizations that serve to neutralize conscience, potential empathy, and guilt. This type of cognition is said to be motivated by an individual’s efforts to prevent damage to their self-image when they find themselves engaging in antisocial behavior.

Cognitive distortions related to self-efficacy in the learning environment may be thought of as learned assumptions, sets of beliefs, and self-statements learners hold which serve to deny, justify, minimize, rationalize, and mitigate responsibility for their own learning. As a result, they are inevitably misled into believing that their reactions to the learning environment are acceptable and so they are absolved from any feelings of guilt, anxiety, or shame for any misguided judgments and biases when evaluating their lecturers. Given the human social complex, it may be argued that self-efficacy operates as a conduit between negative cognitions about self and the world. For this reason, it is understandable why it appears that lecturers rather an evaluation process whereby all individuals in the learning environment are held accountable for the functioning of the systems for which they are responsible for. It is reasonable to assume that both faculty and student attitudes are factors that contribute to the equitability of the learning environment. However, as far as this may appear to be, a perceived problem with adopting this view is that it assumes that underlying belief systems and attitudes play a significant role in the initiating and continuance of the type of experiences both faculty and learns to encounter in the learning environment.

Another interesting factor is that it is not clear which perceptions; those of faculty or student, are the ones most likely to produce a favorable or unfavorable outcomes for both faculty and student. Because of the perceived importance of the role of faculty in the learning process, the concepts of conflicting social competence and social perceptions among faculty and students have not been readily explored. Rather, a general, yet persistent concern among educators has been about and continues to be about guaranteeing quality of instruction in the learning environment.

This push for reliable and sustainable quality assurance measures has resulted in a considerable amount of research that has focused on quantifying the cognitive skills and characteristics that influence teachers’ ability to deliver high-quality and effective instruction [2]. Unfortunately, these studies do not paint the full picture in that they pay little to no emphasis on the ability of students to define and achieve goals based on a foundation of knowing that their own self-determined behavior in choice-making, problem-solving self-advocacy, internal locus of control, self-awareness, and self-knowledge are dispositions to them actively learning. Several studies regarding education isolate individual variables of the learning environment instead of examining the integration of thinking, motivation, and emotions of both staff and students to understand the learning experience. This is believed to be a good area of study since it is generally accepted that learning, though confined within a given environment, is not detached from the context in which it occurs. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that how lecturers perceive the learning environment can influence students’ approach to learning in a similar way that student biases and perceptions of lecturers can influence how students interpret their learning experience.

According to Ref. [3], self-determined behaviors such as choice-making, problem-solving, self-advocacy, internal locus of control, self-awareness, and self-knowledge are component skills critical to student learning. It is the formative social structures and belief systems in the life of a student that dictate the self-determined behaviors students bring to the learning environment. Further, these self-determined behaviors either hinder or propel academic success. A similar view to Ref. [3] comes out in Mezirow’s theory. According to Mezirow’s theory, every individual has a worldview that is tied to a set of paradigmatic assumptions that derive from the individual’s upbringing, life experiences, culture, and level of education [4, 5, 6, 7]. Specifically, Mezirow’s theory is widely regarded for its attempts to explain how adult learners interpret their experiences based on social and other external influences. The theory explores how learners modify the meaning of their experiences when it is considered important enough to them. An interesting implication of Mezirow’s theory is that students perception of the learning environment is a function of their own biases, cognitive distortions, and the social structures and beliefs that students bring to the learning environment, and it is these components that ultimately affect their learning.

Thus, it is reasonable to comprehend why for the average individual the learning environment may be seen as a place of competing social competence and social perception. Theoretically, it cannot be refuted that the learning environment is a place where both faculty and students are required to exercise control over their own thought processes, emotional states, and patterns of behavior. It cannot be denied that the way people believe about themselves determines how they feel, think, motivated, and behave in given circumstances. These natural psychological processes in which self-belief affects behavior are called efficacy-activated processes. In this case, according to human behavior experts, it is not merely the physical reactions or intensity of the emotions that is the concern but how they are perceived by the individual. The perception of emotions and reactions in the eyes of an individual to human behavior specialist is known as self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy, as highlighted in human behavior theory, affects all individuals in a learning environment. It is argued by some researchers of higher education that lecturers who possess a high level of efficacy are most likely capable of motivating their students in such a way that enhances their development. This argument appears to be consistent with various studies that suggest that when students understand what their professors expect of them academically, they develop effective study skills and manage their time effectively. And consequently, this leads to students doing much better. Therefore, the belief is that when students see themselves as part of the campus community and feel valued, they endorse higher ratings on the subjective aspects of academic success.

In contrast, evidence suggests that lecturers with low efficacy tend to employ negative sanctions to push students to study. Self-efficacy beliefs and personal biases of students, on the other hand, lead to the concept of self-serving. Cognitive distortions have been described to be either self-serving or self-debasing. According to Refs. [8, 9, 10], self-serving distortions protect an individual from self-blame or a negative self-concept and are represented by a series of distorted cognitive processes associated with self-perception and usually manifest themselves in four ways:

1. Attitudes that focus on personal needs and rights to the extent that the views, needs, and rights of others are completely ignored.

2. Cognitive patterns that project blame to external sources to deflect guilt from owning responsibility for negative behaviors.

3. Thinking patterns that purport that negative behaviors are deemed an acceptable way to achieve certain objectives.

4. The perception that the most horrible outcome is inevitable or the perception that one’s own behaviors are beyond improvement. These people tend to visualize scenarios of failure and highlight the many things that are most likely to go wrong.

Alternatively, self-debasing cognitive distortions are described as inaccurately debasing the self directly or indirectly. Specifically, self-debasing cognitive distortion includes personalizing, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and selective abstraction. If self-debasing and self-serving are accepted as two key manifestations of cognitive distortions, then it is reasonable to say that cognitive distortions may be viewed as biased or inaccurate ways of conferring meaning to experiences. And it is these misguided thought processes that generally lead to inappropriate reactions and responses from individuals [11].

Piaget’s theory is considered one of the most comprehensive theories regarding cognitive development [12]. According to Piaget’s theory, it is typical for children to transition from the concrete-operational stage to the formal-operational stage as they reach adolescence. In the formal operational stage, adolescents become aware of the consequences of their actions. At this stage, it is believed that there is increased introspection and preoccupation with the self. This concept of egotism has been widely discussed in psychology literature, and it purports that as adolescents progress from concrete to abstract thinking they engage in two forms of distorted thinking: one about themselves, and the other about others [13]. Seminal works about cognition have described these two distorted thinking patterns as either believing oneself as the central focus of any social situation and that the audience’s views parallel with whatever perspective they hold. Or, thinking that they are unique, immune from harm, and more special than anyone else. These two the so-called maladaptive behaviors have been associated with cognitive distortions [14].

Since twenty first-century education no longer perceives learning as the transferal of knowledge from lecturer to student but rather sees the lecturer as a facilitator of learning and the learners as taking charge of their own learning and ascribing meaning to their learning experiences. It is important, given the compelling literature regarding the concepts of social competence and social perception, to study the co-occurrence and impact of cognitive distortions and self-efficacy of both lecturer and learner in the learning environment. Some people may disagree with this since for many people, academic success is the most important outcome in an educational environment and that’s where the focus should be. Unfortunately, quantifying success presents a challenge since it can be defined, conceptualized, and even measured in many ways. To date, some researchers still believe that there is no consistent definition of academic success. According to them, this lack of a definitive definition for academic success makes it difficult to ascertain what indicators to collect.

To possibly improve upon this and potentially define academic success precisely, requires characterization of the assumptions, practices, and relationships that may be key elements defining teaching and learning issues in the learning environment. Given this requirement, it may be argued that defining the learning environment may actually require investigations rooted in the dimensions of physical health. According to health professionals, in the domain of physical health person is capable of maintaining physiological homeostasis through changing circumstances. They argue that when confronted with physiological stress a healthy person is capable to produce a healthy response to reduce potential for harm and restore balance. If this physiological coping strategy fails negative responses result. Therefore, we believe what many researchers call the inadequate definition of the learning environment and academic success, is essentially a question of how to adequately quantify the concept of human health with respect to physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and social wellbeing with respect to environmental wellbeing of a learning environment. We propose that a way to address this would be to diminish the current lack of clarity regarding human inputs such as self-efficacy and cognitive distortions and their effect on academic success, student satisfaction, and learning in the learning environment. To accomplish this, it may be prudent to reexamine current perspectives and conceptual ideas about the learning environment to achieve the best possible outcome for adult learners. Satisfaction as defined by Ref. [15] is the enjoyment of experiences as a student. Students can reflect on the positives and negatives of the learning environment and decide on their level of satisfaction. Thus, it may be argued that what a student deems as satisfying is subjective and as such a students’ satisfaction level may fluctuate depending upon how situations change during their academic life. Therefore, it is undeniable that there could be many different indicators of success and hence a countless number of variables can influence a students’ attainment of academic success.

We strongly suspect that improving our understanding the role that self-efficacy and cognitive distortions may play in educational settings may have both theoretical as well as practical significance in appropriately managing learning the environment. At a practical level, examining the role of cognitive distortions and self-efficacy in relation to the learning environment may inform the development and implementation of policies for guarantying quality education. At the theoretical level, it may provide insight into the mechanisms underlying how students give meaning to their learning experience in each environment. The learning environment for the purposes of this review is considered comprising of three basic components: the environment facilitating the learning, the learning processes, and the learning outcomes. This work contends that it is the students and faculty that interact with these three components and understanding how both faculty and students exhibit behaviors in which their beliefs about themselves cause them to be products and producers of their own experiences in the learning environment is difficult to quantify. It is not clear if these elements may be aligned with each other or not. However, it is the learning environment that provides the context in which students define their learning experience.

Conceptually, the learning environment may be thought of as the campus settings, the structure of the programs, and the students’ approaches to learning [16]. As highlighted by Ref. [16], the learning environment is informed by the desired learning outcomes and specifies the content and resources that support the outcomes. Additionally, it encompasses physical and virtual spaces, and the nature of the technology-enhanced environment. It also specifies the design of the learning and activities that facilitate the learning process. The learning environment is also characterized as being specified at different levels of design depending on the timeframe of the planned activity. According to Ref. [16], at one level, the learning environment may specify the overarching activities and context to a unit of study over a semester, including the learning objectives, assessment activities and deadlines, and content to be covered. At another level, the learning environment might specify the design of a computer simulation that covers a conceptually difficult area. More importantly, Ref. [16] iterates that an overarching characteristic of a learning environment is that it is designed and therefore can be described.

As a result, this review examines the concepts of social competence and social perception as they relate to the environmental wellbeing of learners by assuming that self-efficacy and cognitive distortions are the major inputs and indicators that ultimately impact students’ perception of the learning environment. It is assumed that students’ psychosocial characteristics is the catalyst for all other experiences in the learning environment as it is the characteristics that students bring with them as they enter the educational environment. It is then how these characteristics relate to the various components embedded in the learning environment that channel the learning process. The learning process can be described as the ways in which students engage in the learning environment and the learning activities embedded in it [16]. Specifically, in the works of Ref. [16], it refers to all the cognitive activities that contribute to learning and the way those activities are executed. In contrast, the learning outcomes demonstrate the things students can demonstrate after a course of study. According to Ref. [16], the term learning outcome is not precisely used in higher education. It is their view that there is some fuzziness between learning outcomes and learning objectives even though these terms have been used interchangeably. Further, they iterate that objectives speak to what a student should be able to do after a course of study while outcomes address what they can do.

To demonstrate how the concepts of social competence and social perception; particularly self-efficacy and cognitive distortions may impact academic success, we first had to select a model we deemed capable of capturing the multifaceted dimensions of physical health, mental health, and social health in relation to the corresponding environmental stressors. We discovered that the Inputs-Environment-Outcomes (I-E-O) conceptual model is utilized as a theoretical framework for the interacting components of a learning environment. Therefore, this model was selected not only because it is well-known and a highly regarded framework that establishes a conceptual linkage between environmental conditions and human mechanisms that potentially allows for an interpretation of how the components of the learning environment respond to each other.

Specifically, the I-E-O conceptual model is described as a model that attempts to capture the interactions between the wide range of educational, social, and cultural backgrounds students bring to the learning environment and the educational outcomes for each student under the given environmental circumstances. More succinctly, the I-E-O model was designed to assess the impact of various environmental experiences by determining if students developed or changed in specific ways under variable environmental conditions. This type of model design assumes that it is the environmental conditions that are the most significant to the learning environment. While the original model is generally used to understand how student characteristics interact with the learning environment, we believe that it is the efficacies that students input into the learning environment that is significant to understanding how students interpret the environmental stimuli they meet. For example, we believe that constructing the correct health frames entering the learning environment is critical to educational managers adequately differentiate between the different operational needs of the learning environment.

Therefore, in this review it is highlighted how the I-E-O model may be reimagined to potentially conceptualize how cognition and self-belief in the form of self-efficacy and cognitive distortion precede and inform student choices and attitudes toward their learning environments rather than the environment informing student choices. Although we believe the converse, it is our belief that the original I-E-O model still innately provides a good starting point with the potential to make educators cognizant of environmental wellbeing in a way that may potentially inform whether learners are operating in a good physical, mental, and social state. We also believe that by reimagining the I-E-O model using the mechanisms by which cognitive factors affect human development in the learning environment allows for a more succinct way of considering how specific behaviors and assumptions made by students may ultimately be the nexus between academic success, defining the learning environment, and the underlying social, psychological, and psychosocial judgments related to defining learning experiences and satisfaction in the learning environment. Specifically, we believe that the inputs we propose allow us to better assess whether an institution’s environmental state outweighs the mechanisms by which cognitive factors affect the human self-beliefs that are critically important for understanding the self-evaluation mechanisms and coping responses students bring to the learning environment.

To give context to the revisions made to the original I-E-O model, the following section provides a brief overview of the I-E-O model before presenting the proposed revisions. According to the I-E-O model, learning is a function of demographic characteristics and experiences in the learning environment. The re-envisioned I-E-O presented in this review purports that it is the self-efficacy and cognitive distortions that students input into the learning environment and is the driving force to learning and the positive or negative experiences they attribute to the environment. We strongly believe that any relation between the learning environment and student outcomes cannot be quantified in the absence of these student inputs. It is the inputs into the learning environment that direct our interpretations of how environment-induced interactions coupled with these inputs translate into negative or positive experiences for students in an educational setting. Essentially, it is believed that the revised I-E-O model has the capacity to potentially map out how interactions between inputs and environment affect the social and academic experiences of students individually with respect to their self-imposed beliefs about the learning environment and its educational outcomes. We believe that our approach better represents the general concept of environmental wellbeing in such a way that faculty can better communicate with learners by empowering their perceived quality of life and wellbeing in the learning environment.

2. The I-E-O model of the learning environment

The I-E-O model is a theoretical framework used for examining the extent to which a program’s outputs are a function of the quality of its inputs. As previously mentioned, the I-E-O model was chosen for its ability to relate the demographic characteristics, family backgrounds, academic, and social experiences that students bring to an educational institution to the institution’s environment, the people, programs, policies, cultures, and the experiences that students encounter in the learning environment to the outcomes, students’ characteristics, knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and beliefs and behaviors impacting their academic success.

According to Ref. [17], the I-E-O model provides a way to clearly identify academic success as an outcome. Hence, carves a path for obtaining a more focused and accurate definition of academic success in terms of either inputs, the environment, or a combination of both. Figure 1 is a general representation of the I-E-O conceptual framework.

Figure 1.

The general I-E-O conceptual framework.

The notion of the I-E-O model paving a path to a more focused and accurate definition of academic success is not implausible as the inputs of the original Astin’s I-E-O model are believed to clearly identify sources that directly affect elements of the learning environment that then act as catalysts for how students achieve and perceive their academic ability. This means that by design, the I-E-O model has the potential to map the relationships between student characteristics as they enter college or university and the level of academic success, they reach using the construct of how well students integrate academically and socially in a learning environment as situations change during their academic life. Academic integration, as highlighted in Ref. [18], pertains to the intellectual development of students. For this reason, some researchers consider academic integration to be particularly related to outcomes of grade point averages and acquisition of knowledge and skills. They argue that a lack of academic integration tends to produce lower grades and sometimes students drop out because of unsatisfactory performance. Social integration in contrast involves interaction with peers and participation in social activities on campus [19]. In this case, it is believed that a lack of social integration leaves students disconnected from others and that can result in voluntary leave. According to Ref. [19], students studying with friends develop a sense of belonging while at the same time learning course content.

Given that the I-E-O model inherently links the inputs to the learning environment to academic success it is adapted for this review to further depict how specific inputs such as social competence and social perception can affect academic ability and drive to achieve in the learning process. Additionally, the I-E-O is adapted to illustrate that the ability of students to cope with the dynamics of the learning environment also plays an important role in their academic success. Here, it is assumed that students’ perception of their own academic ability and drive to achieve will influence their behaviors and hence their interactions with each of the elements of the learning environment they must interact with. It is further assumed that it is these very interactions with the environment that determine the level of skills, knowledge, and level of satisfaction students attain from the learning process.

Although the work of Ref. [17] is highly regarded for its theoretical demonstration of the existence of several significant relationships between inputs, environment, and outcomes of the learning process, it does not explicitly identify or depict how each variable and other variables or combination of variables themselves are contingent on external information about the persons navigating the interlinking components of the I-E-O framework. For example, it is accepted among researchers that an effect is contingent upon a condition or set of conditions if it always occurs if the condition or set of conditions is met. It is also accepted that such conditions are sufficient but not necessary for producing the effect. In other words, the I-E-O model suggests that human actions are necessary conditions introduced into the learning environment that affect the outcomes of that environment. However, what it does not show is how these human actions themselves depend on person-related conditions to begin with. Despite this, what the I-E-O model shows is that measuring the level of academic success as it relates to the learning environment is far more challenging and that no one singular model represents the learning process adequately. This apparent gap provided the avenue for this review to explore the person-related conditions and the experiences of the learning environment that may or may not support academic success. Due to the diversity of the students coming to the learning environment, it is very possible that there could be a variety of person-related conditions that once considered to be a contributing factor to the learning environment, may produce very different results regarding the level of academic as cohorts change.

Therefore, we believe it is imperative to scientifically formulate a model of the learning environment suitable for depicting environment-induced interactions. At present, there were no indicators to suggest that the I-E-O model was ever expressed using person-related conditions such as social competence and social perception as its sole inputs and necessary conditions to understanding the learning environment and what it takes to extract the best meaning to the term academic success. In this review, self-efficacy and cognitive distortions are used as realistic theoretical person-related conditions that determine the perceptions students form about their learning experience as they interact with the various components in a learning environment. In adopting this approach, it is believed that rather than only depicting an environment that can produce a certain effect on its students, this person-related version of the I-E-O model and a multiple regression method makes it possible to use self-efficacy and cognitive distortions as the research object to depict more elaborately how students are endowed with certain means or conditions in a learning environment that enable them to attain certain academic goals. Figure 2 is an illustration of this theoretical person-related construction of the I-E-O model that we believe is capable of analyzing the environment-induced interactions of the learning environment and puts forward a specific path for combining student characteristics and education to optimize our understanding of the learning environment so as to comprehensively improve upon the level of academic success student attain after completing some academic program.

Figure 2.

The person-related I-E-O conceptual framework.

It is believed that this version of the I-E-O model explicitly shows how human conditions and actions themselves depend on initial conditions they themselves input into an environment. Figure 2 defines these human actions via general initial inputs of social perceptions and interactions which are innate in all demographics of life. More succinctly, they are depicted as self-efficacy and cognitive distortions. As such, it is believed that the I-E-O model depicted in Figure 2 is more reflective of underlying influences of social competence and social perception in the learning environment. Social competence is considered the general capacity to integrate cognition, affect, and behavior to succeed with a specific social task and to achieve some positive developmental outcome. It is believed that socially competent people have several interrelated sets of cognitive, affective, and behavioral competencies. According to the literature, there are five core competency clusters: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Being socially and emotionally competent has been shown to predict and be related to many other elements in achieving positive developmental outcomes. Social perception, in contrast, looks at how individuals integrate available social information with prior expectations and cognitions to form impressions of social situations and other people, how social events are explained and classified, and how these processes impact behavior.

Based on the literature exploring the constructs of social competence and social perception, it is thought necessary to highlight this component of the learning as a critical variable to the I-E-O model as it is widely established that misunderstanding and wrong reactions are produced from the inappropriate encoding of cues and biased interpretations of social signals. Various studies exploring the origin, development, and maintenance of antisocial behavior have articulated the importance of self-serving distortions and social cognition to encoding and interpreting cues, selecting goals, and executing responses. Therefore, it is believed that using both self-efficacy and cognitive distortion as the governing inputs to the I-E-O model is reasonable as it is accepted that for people to respond appropriately to social situations, social information must be interpreted and processed correctly. In addition to using social perception as critical input to the I-E-O model, Figure 2 depicts learning experiences with respect to the broad general components of the learning environment that students must encode, interpret, and execute responses to during their academic life. Currently, it is hoped that Figure 2 be viewed as a simple first approximation representation of the learning environment and, as more knowledge in this accumulates, it may be possible to develop, from this basic approximation, a clearer understanding of the possible strengths and weaknesses of constructing a model of the learning environment based on self-efficacy and cognition.

However, from a theoretical perspective, the constructs behind Figure 2 are accepted to be strong as they are rooted in well-established frameworks such as Biggs’ 3-P model and the learning-centered evaluation framework. Given that this is the case, the model presented in this review is believed to be an adequate theoretical framework capable of illustrating the relationship between students’ perceptions of their learning environment, their approaches to study, and academic outcomes as they relate to cognition, efficacy, social competence, and social perception in the learning environment. In the most basic sense, Figure 2 is a generalization of the interacting components defining the learning environment. However, it tries to connect the components of the learning environment in a way that reliably depicts cognition and self-efficacy as the main governing inputs that influence how students perceive and interpret their learning experience in each learning environment. Particularly, the model is believed to better define the learning environment through a realistic set of human characteristics as the source inputs that depict the learning process as a system of interacting variables that directly influence outcomes. At present, the model is believed to have the potential to communicate a clear road map of the chain of variables or components linking the concepts of social competence and social perception in the learning environment to definitive measures of academic success. It is believed that this model has the potential for researchers to be able to isolate and examine how the policies, practice, and other characteristics interact with each other in the learning environment to exert a direct influence on academic success. It is assumed that understanding how these variables interact with each other may potentially help educators to better articulate how students construct their learning experience based on their perceived reality. In making this assumption it is accepted the notion that students’ perceptions about their learning experience play a significant role in defining what constitutes the learning environment. This viewpoint can be supported in works such as Ref. [20] points out that understanding how students ultimately learn requires knowing what goals they set for themselves and what reasons they have for doing specific tasks. Therefore, reality as experienced by students may be considered an intervening variable of the learning environment that should not be ignored. It is implied by Ref. [20] that the nature of student learning is closely related to their cognition and self-efficacy. It is further implied that the way in which students think about learning and studying, determines the way they perceive their learning experience and the way they evaluate faculty. Ultimately, it is thought that there are three general perceptions students tend to have regarding learning.

According to education experts, students may have a surface perspective of learning. This view of learning pertains to a mere intention to approach an assessment minimally [21]. They expect the assessment to be nothing more than routine memorization or simple procedural problem-solving activity. Another perspective of learning that is common among students is the so-called deep learning. In this case, students tend to focus on gaining an understanding of the assessments they take. The final view of learning is one where students want to attain the highest possible grades on all assessments. Another aspect of the learning environment related to students’ reality of learning pertains to the type of assessments they prefer [21]. It is accepted that different types of assessments impact student approaches to learning. It is believed that how students perceive a particular evaluation method, how they experience assessment modes, and the assessment methods they favor, for example, multiple-choice, essay format, examination, portfolios, simulations, and self and peer assessment may evoke any of the three basic perspectives of learning.

When it comes to conventional assessment methods such as multiple-choice, examination, or essay, several studies have shown that students prefer multiple-choice. They report that students receive multiple-choice better because they view these assessments to be easier to prepare and take, and almost always result in them attaining higher grades. In contrast, students who are considered to have reasonably good learning skills and lots of confidence in their ability prefer essay assessments over multiple-choice. However, students classified as having low confidence in their ability prefer multiple-choice over constructed-response type of assessment. Assessment expectation also impacts the perspective of the learning environment. It is reported that the performance of students expecting a multiple-choice assessment as opposed to an essay assessment is different. Studying for an expected essay or multiple-choice do not prepare students the same way. Studying for an expected multiple-choice was found not to prepare students to take an essay examination. On the other hand, studying for an expected essay seems to prepare students equally well for a multiple-choice. When students do not like a particular assessment method, they tend to consider the assessment as inappropriate. According to several researchers, it is not clear on how the relationships between assessment preferences influence the negative reactions students may develop to faculty.

We contend that by utilizing a Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (SEQ) in conjunction with what we calle Person-related I-E-O Conceptual Framework it is possible to test possible connections between self-efficacy and the environmental wellbeing of learners in the learning environment. The self-efficacy scale associated with the questionnaire explores three main areas which include: self-regulatory efficacy, academic self-efficacy, and social self-efficacy. Self-regulatory efficacy pertains to the capability to avoid engaging in high-risk activities such as transgressive behavior. Academic self-efficacy focuses on a learner’s perceived capacity to master academic matters. Social self-efficacy deals with the ability of the learner to handle social challenges. A brief adapted preview of the sampling questions of the SEQ used by [22] is as follows:

Emotional self-efficacy

1. How well do you succeed in not worrying about things that might happen?

2. How well do you succeed in suppressing unpleasant thoughts?

3. How well can you give yourself a pep talk when you are feeling low?

4. How well can you control your feelings?

5. How well can you prevent becoming nervous?

6. How well do you succeed in cheering yourself up when an unpleasant event occurs?

Academic self-efficacy

1. How well can you pay attention during each class?

2. How well can you prepare for an assessment?

3. How well can you succeed in completing assignments?

4. How well do you engage with your lecturers to get help when you are stuck on assignments?

5. How well can you remain focused when there are interesting external activities to engage in?

6. How successful are you at passing courses?

Social self-efficacy

1. How well do you succeed in preventing conflict with your peers?

2. How well do you succeed in befriending others?

3. How well can you communicate with an unfamiliar person?

4. How well do work in harmony with your peers?

5. How well do succeed in remaining in friendships with your peers?

6. How well do you express your opinion to your peers when they are doing something wrong?

Similar to the work of Ref. [22], an explanatory factor analysis may then be performed on these items and Cronbach’s alpha employed to objectively measure the reliability of the instrument. According to Ref. [22], that particular study found a negative association between self-efficacy and depression in that environment. The data that they compiled was reported to show that the connection was carried by emotional and academic self-efficacy. Hence, according to Ref. [22], social self-efficacy was not significantly related to depression. The value of the work by [22] is an indicator that the instrument proposed in this review to relate self-efficacy and cognition to environmental wellbeing in the learning environment is a theoretically viable measure of the characteristics related to the interactions between learners and their environment and the wider relationship between the learning environment and the components making up the environment.

3. Conclusion

Twenty first century educators purport that a healthy environment is a critical component to learning and academic success in the learning environment. Consequently, educational policies should address not only traditional concepts such as physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and social wellbeing but should also evolve to convey what health really means in the present day educational context. This viewpoint suggests that the concept of human health is not only a composite of the traditional concepts of health but extends to encompass environmental wellbeing. Environmental wellbeing relates to the characteristics of the interactions between people and their environment. As a result, this review attempted to describe the learning environment via a modified version of the I-E-O model as a complex system contingent upon the ability to measure the strength of a learner’s physiological resilience, ability to cope and to adapt, and to self-manage. We used the I-E-O model for its innate characteristics. The I-E-O model, as previously discussed, is a general framework that relates student characteristics to the components of the learning environment and the corresponding learning experiences students have in an educational environment. It cannot be denied that the way students think about learning and studying, determines the way they perceive their learning experience and the way they evaluate faculty. Therefore, it may be argued that how students construct their learning experience is entirely based on their perceived reality. If this is accepted to be true, then it may be possible to describe the learning environment in terms of the social competence and social perception students input into an educational setting. However, the original I-E-O model does not explicitly convey this in its conceptual representation of the general inputs students bring to the learning environment. We addressed this by specifying in our model integral cognitive behavioral inputs to the learning environment that we deem critical to students constructing and assigning meaning to their interaction with the learning environment and any negative experiences they may respond to. Conceptually, this review explored this idea of social competence and perception in the learning environment through a theoretically expanded version of the I-E-O conceptual framework of the learning environment using four key components. These included the learning process, learning outcomes, academic success, and student self-efficacy and cognition. This generalized and integrated version of the I-E-O framework is still very broad in nature but may be viewed at the same time as being pedagogically neutral. Although the presented framework appears to cover a wide range of contexts, it is believed that it remains consistent with well-established ideas regarding the learning process as it builds on and encompasses other recognized theoretical frameworks of the learning environment. No claims are made in this review that the theoretical model presented supersedes other fundamental models of the learning environment. Neither is the claim made that this version of the I-E-O framework revolutionizes what is already known about the learning environment. However, what is shown is a view of the learning environment that integrates the concepts of social competence and social perception of learning into one generalized framework called the learning environment. It is believed that such depictions of the learning environment make it possible to improve in better defining and characterizing what constitutes academic success and learning in the learning environment given the fluidity in demands of an ever evolving educational environment. Conceptually, it is believed that the presented version of the I-E-O framework can potentially contribute to improved educational design of learning by incorporating concepts of self-efficacy beliefs and personal biases in educational environments. It is believed that this provides a mechanism for focusing attention on all aspects of the learning process in a way that allows educators the opportunity to choose specific strategies most appropriate to the learning context. For example, it is believed that this extended I-E-O model has the potential to be used as a guide for evaluation and research into education innovations that specifically look at better understanding how lecturers and students engage with each other in a social, psychological, and psychosocial environment in which learning occurs. The significance of our formulation of the I-E-O in terms of self-efficacy and cognitive distortions is that we have created a model using the concept of environmental wellness in the learning environment as the ability to self-manage. We believe that this approach systematizes the different operational needs, functioning, and perceived quality of wellbeing in the learning environment. This makes it as what we believe is a good operational tool that may further enhance how we view and define the learning environment with respect to the increasing social, physical, emotional challenges learners such that educators and educational stakeholders in education can make conscious decisions to respond to the socio-emotional health of students in innovative and context-specific interventions.