A study examined the hypothesis that learning strategy coupled with efficacy-building teaching interactions would lead to greater strategic learning than learning strategy instruction alone. A reading comprehension strategy was taught to 184 students from 4 Los Angeles County (California) public and independent schools. Included were 65 fifth-graders, 69 sixth graders, and 50 seventh-graders. Of those, 95 were male and 89 female. Both the control and the experimental groups received 300 minutes of instruction/testing over 5 days. Self-report measures of learning strategy use and efficacy beliefs relative to strategy competency were administered and compared to gains in application of the strategy to reading passages and number of paragraph patterns identified. Multivariate analysis of covariance indicated that students who received the efficacy-building strategy instruction believed that they were more competent in the task than students receiving learning strategy instruction alone. In addition, findings revealed that students in the efficacy-building learning strategy instruction scored higher on two different achievement tests than the students receiving learning strategy instruction alone. The results of the investigation support the importance of students' efficacy beliefs in teaching new strategies. (Four tables of data and a 2-part appendix, containing instructional practices and instructional procedures, are included; contains 44 references.) (Author/CR)