Development of student confidence for academic success

Context: the first year in university is a difficult learning curve for many students, even more so for those from diverse cultural and non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB). For lecturers, teaching first year engineering is a difficult enterprise. Student learning during the first few weeks of tertiary education is often compromised by extraneous activities. Student confidence about their academic competence are considered particularly because they impact on student learning and achievement. Current and previous research into how diverse student populations acquire knowledge, process the data and integrate and retrieve relevant academic information has been filtered to develop a comprehensive approach to student confidence in their learning and teaching. As we have a wide range of students from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, we expect different approaches to learning due to their contextual environment influencing their future work circumstances. The first year student cohort may not fully appreciate, understand and implement the enriched teaching and learning methodology, resulting in different levels of student confidence to achieve successful outcomes. Purpose: the purpose of the work was to “determine the effect of changing a teaching methodology for a first year engineering subject on student confidence and ability to achieve academic success.” Approach: over the past two years, university wide surveys were conducted to determine student “confidence” of academic success at week four of a 12 week semester. These confidence predictions were correlated with overall academic performance at the end of the semester. Students were informed of the correlations of the survey with the success of the “new” teaching approach – especially in relation to their academic achievements, so giving them confidence in their academic abilities. We will continue with this research to establish whether students’ perceptions of self-confidence change after the initial survey period, and whether those opinions are an indicator of academic success, for a diverse student population. Results: our results indicate that although student perceive that the subject “is difficult and I do not have confidence in my success”; their academic performance at the completion of the subject is of a higher average grade than that obtained during the traditional teaching in the previous two years. However, because it is a first year subject attempted by the students, and most are not employed in an engineering environment, we are not able to predict their performance in their (diverse) work environment. At this stage, we will continue with the integrated teaching model and will intermittently inform the students of the different previous success rates, indicating that confidence has to be built up and cannot measured during the first three weeks of the subject delivery. Conclusions: it is anticipated that students will understand that confidence is built over a period of time, and cannot be based on a “snap” decision after only three weeks of university enrolment, and so may not be an indicator of academic success.