Self-Confidence of Undergraduate Students in Designing Software Architecture

Abstract

This paper investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. Background: these students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability to use their knowledge to design software architectures. Intended Outcomes: Self-confidence is expected to be related to the students' course expectations, cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. Application Design: 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. Findings: We found that self-confidence is weakly associated with the students' course expectations and critical thinking and independent from their cognitive levels and preferred learning methods. The results suggest that to improve the self-confidence of the students, the instructors should ensure that the students' have "correct" course expectations and work on improving the students' critical thinking capabilities.