Understanding Academic Confidence

Abstract

Understanding academic confidence was one of a number of papers that I published, more often in collaboration with Lalage Sanders, on our psychometric scale developed to measure students’ levels of academic confidence. This, like the studies into student presentations was a product of our 2000 paper which suggested that some of the differences in students’ views could be explained by differing levels of student confidence – specifically confidence pertaining to their academic studies in general and therefore at a more global level than that addressed through efficacy measures. The object of this particular paper was to put the scale we developed (the Academic Behavioural Confidence scale) into a theoretical context, although the psychometric properties of the scale, as they were then understood were summarised. Subsequent analysis that I have done through Structural Equation Modelling suggests a different factor structure to the scale (Sander and Sanders, under review).