enhance academic performance" (Picou, 1978, p.429), while sensible in some sense, is intrinsically unsatisfying as an explanation. To explain the role of athletics in enhancing academic performance it is necessary to point to an interaction between personality variables and external factors in athletics that reliably produce attitudes related to increased efficacy and achievement orientation.
Self esteem would seem to furnish a candidate label for the variables presumed to underlie the transformation of experiences within the athletic context into attitudes and behaviors that eventuate in improved performance in school and in other domains. Simply speaking, success on the athletic field may imbue the athlete with positive feelings about him or herself that he or she carries forth into interactions within the formal academic program of high school. Such a claim presupposes that a positive attitude alone is sufficient to produce more or less generalized increments in performance in at least some individuals (Bandura, Adams, Hardy, & Howells, 1980).
Bandura (1977) has defined the concept of self efficacy, which refers to the individual's self confidence, the belief in his or her ability to master a task. Self efficacy is not only clearly genetically related to the concept of self esteem, it is assumed to play a direct role in producing positive behavior change. Moreover, self efficacy, as Bandura defines it, is the mechanism at the basis of all stress reduction techniques. The acquistion of athletic skill closely resemble, in fact, performance based stress reduction procedures. In such procedures, a participant progresses through stages of skill acquisition until he or she achieves mastery of that skill, much as one does in the course of acquiring an advanced athletic skill (Brody, Hatfield & Spalding, 1988).
The learning of sports skills may result in the learning of general coping abilities. It is po...