Biography

            Dr. Frank Pajares was born October 19th in Spain as Manuel Francisco Pajares. He died January 4, 2009. The professor requested that there be no funeral after his death to include an obituary. (Frank Pajares, n.d.). Dr. Pajares had a distinguished professional career, but his personal life is challenging to research.

            Dr. Pajares attended the University of Florida for his undergraduate studies. He began teaching middle school in 1973 in Tehran, Iran at a community school that eventually closed in 1980. During his time at the school in Tehran, he was headmaster and an educator. After the school in Tehran closed, he taught middle school at the American School of Mallorca until 1982. He also taught middle school in Florida. Dr. Pajares was a professor at Emory University in Educational Psychology. During his time at Emory, Dr. Pajares won many awards including Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Crystal Apple Award. He also received the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of educational psychology (Pajares, 2002; Urquhart, 2007). I chose to research Dr. Pajares because of his view of a collaborative classroom atmosphere and his belief in the student. It is clear from the memorial page dedicated to Dr. Pajares that he was a well-respected educator (Frank Pajares, n.d.).

              Dr. Pajares believed in investing time in his students. In the summer of 2007 Dr. Pajares was interviewed for an article in the Emory Report and said, “Nothing is professionally more important than giving my students the time they require (Urquhart, 2007).” Dr. Pajares remained humble throughout the interview and said he wanted his legacy to be the difference he has made in his student’s lives. Pajares’ work is based on Bandura’s theory of social cognitive theory regarding human functioning. Dr. Pajares taught of self-efficacy and the role of self-efficacy in academic accomplishment. Pajares writing is easy to locate, but information on his personal life is difficult to find.

 

Lecture and writing

            What Dr. Pajares lacks in personal information he makes up for in publications. Dr. Pajares was an extensively published author and frequent lecturer on educational psychology. He also developed and maintained a website dedicated to social cognitive theory and self-efficacy where he chronicles the writing of William James and Bandura (“Self-efficacy information,” 2014).

            Dr. Pajares wrote and spoke about self-efficacy in children. In his lecture, Schooling in America: Myths, Mixed Messages, and Good Intentions in 2000, he took the student on a journey through educational psychology. He spoke of psychologists such as William James, Freud, Jung, and Erikson. He compared the educational structure from the 1960s and 1970s to the “cognitive revolution” experienced in the 1980s. The focus from the 1960s and 1970s was to promote and foster a child’s self-esteem, which is a sharp contrast to the focus of the 1980s goal of academic motivation and achievement. Dr. Pajares then introduces social cognitive theory and self-efficacy as proposed by Dr. Albert Bandura. He also uses the theories of John Dewey to support social cognitive theory. Dr. Pajares spends a substantial amount of time discussing how self-efficacy is vital during childhood education. He encourages educators to nurture the students’ self-beliefs by creating learning experiences that are challenging, but possible to master to develop the students’ effort, persistence, and resilience in academic endeavors.

            Dr. Pajares spent a significant amount of time publishing research on self-efficacy beliefs in childhood. In one paper, “Empirical properties of a scale to assess writing efficacy in school contexts (2007),”  he notes that writing self-efficacy beliefs and writing performances are related. In his article, “Gender and perceived self-efficacy in self-regulated learning (2002),” he compares self-efficacy beliefs of children through elementary school and middle school. He notes that children rate their academic aptitude similarly in elementary school, but by middle schools boys see themselves as more efficacious than girls. There are many possible causes for this change including the encouragement for girls to be “more modest” and boys to be more “self-congratulatory.” The differences can also be the result of home, cultural, or mass media influence (Pajares, 2002). Distressingly, parents can influence a child’s self-efficacy by portraying math and science as male domains and underestimating their daughters’ academic competence thereby holding the girls to a lower standard (Pajares, 2002).

 

Impacts and Contributions to Education

            Dr. Pajares encourages teachers to nurture their students’ self-beliefs. Particularly in early childhood when students perception of themselves forms by their perception of how others see them as described by Cooley’s “looking-glass self”  theory (Pajares, 2002). He encourages the development of an individualized classroom with instruction tailored to individual student needs. Dr. Pajares also notes that students who received feedback that was timely and relevant demonstrated the greatest increase in self-efficacy (Pajares 2002; Pajares 2007).

            Self-efficacy develops from four sources: mastery experiences, vicarious experience, social messages, and physiological states (Pajares, 2000). Teachers, then, play a vital role in the development of self-efficacy beliefs through modeling or vicarious experience. Pajares proposes two models: a coping model and a mastery model. He describes the coping model as a teacher who readily admits, and then corrects, mistakes. He states this model teaches students that anyone can make a mistake. The other model, mastery models, teach students that authority figures to not make mistakes thereby teaching students that errors are unacceptable.

            Dr. Pajares expands on the work of Bandura, James, and other social cognitive theorists. His research is of particular importance to self-efficacy beliefs in elementary education but is also important in adult education.

 

References

 

Frank Pajares- We remember you. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/groups/43564764454/

 

Pajares, F. (2000). Schooling in America: Myths, mixed messages, and good intentions. Lecture delivered at the Great Teachers Lecture Series, Cannon Chapel, Emory University, Atlanta.

 

Pajares, F. (2002). Gender and perceived self-efficacy in self-regulated learning. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 116-125.

 

Pajares, F. (2007). Empirical properties of a scale to assess writing efficacy in school contexts. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 39, 239-249.

 

Self-efficacy information. (2014, June 25). Retrieved from http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/self-efficacy.html

 

Urquhart, K. (2007). Teaching the teachers. Emory Report, 59(25).