Students' 'academic behavioural confidence': What predicts it?

What is it about?

Research shows that university students’ academic engagement and performance can be usefully predicted by something called academic behavioural confidence (ABC), a set of self-beliefs in study-focused behaviours. While ABC can predict many outcomes like grades and career decisions, less is known about what predicts ABC. We recruited a total of 328 students across 16 English universities who completed an online survey with measures of their ABC, self-esteem, ethnic identity, peer pressure, social support, and substance dependence and theirs and their tutor’s demographics. We found that aspects of ABC differed by student gender (male higher), university type (traditional universities higher than 'modern'/newer ones), and degree type (vocational course students such as nursing and accounting higher than non-vocational students such as psychology and sociology). ABC was also positively associated with self-esteem and social support and negatively with peer pressure and drug dependence and, for ethnic minority students, with ethnic identity. Analysis comparing the relative strength of these factors to predict ABC found that gender, age, self-esteem, peer pressure and drug dependence were the most consistent predictors.

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Photo by DuoNguyen on Unsplash

Photo by DuoNguyen on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The findings highlight the importance of both individual factors like demographics and factors that can be enhanced by improving social networks for students' study-focused self-efficacy. These have implications for universities in terms of allocating resources for monitoring ABC and its contributors for targeted study-focused and pastoral support to students.

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