Self-Confidence of Undergraduate Students in Designing Software Architecture

TL;DR

This study examines factors influencing undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence, finding a weak link with critical thinking and suggesting instructor focus on enhancing critical thinking to boost confidence.

Contribution

It identifies the limited association between self-confidence and various student factors and emphasizes the importance of critical thinking development in education.

Findings

Self-confidence is weakly associated with critical thinking.

Self-confidence is independent of cognitive levels, learning methods, and course expectations.

Improving critical thinking can enhance students' self-confidence.

Abstract

Software architecture students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability to use their knowledge to design software architectures. This paper investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. We developed a questionnaire with open-ended questions to assess the self-confidence levels and related factors, which was taken by one-hundred ten students in two semesters. The students answers were coded and analyzed afterward. We found that self-confidence is weakly associated with the students' critical thinking and independent from their cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and expectations from the course. The results suggest that to improve the self-confidence of the students, the instructors should work on improving the students' critical thinking capabilities.