Confidence in a Pandemic: Students’ Self-efficacy when Volunteering in an Online Tax Clinic

Abstract

With the advent of COVID-19 restrictions, a student tax clinic had to transform itself from delivering face-to-face pro-bono tax assistance to a fully online environment. This transformation to online had a number of technical and legal issues to navigate, such as how to provide for adequate supervision by a registered tax agent of students’ assistance. While students appreciated the ability to continue their experience working at the tax clinic online, what did it mean in terms of their self-efficacy (confidence)? Particularly, with the online environment would students still have sufficient opportunities to develop their self-efficacy through mastering, modelling, social persuasion, and judgements of their own physiological states? This article describes how the tax clinic was able to operate fully online and will provide data concerning the development of students’ self-efficacy. To provide a comparison, data from prior cohorts who participated face-to-face will also be considered.

Keywords: WIL, self efficacy, online, COVID-19, tax

JEL Classification: K34, H20, I21