Chapter 9: Confidence: Is It Different From Self-Efficacy and Is It Important?

Over the past two decades self-beliefs have been among the most extensively studied constructs in psychology and education. Two self-beliefs constructs—self-efficacy and confidence—have raised the question among practitioners and researchers alike whether they are in fact conceptually and methodologically the same but labeled differently. Both constructs are seen as tapping into the areas in-between cognitive and non-cognitive attributes (Bandura, 1997; Stankov, 2000a) and they are interpreted as one’s structure of knowledge about oneself and about the task being evaluated. Thus, both constructs incorporate the cognitive processes of self-reflection and evaluation of the difficulty of the task being asked. However, their differences can also be readily conceptualized. While self-efficacy can be sufficiently expressed as “I can do this” (Bandura, 2012, p.16), confidence has another layer of self-belief and can be expressed as “I am sure I have done this correctly.” Confidence, as used in studies of ours, taps into the mindset of “done well.” When these two constructs are applied in the context of learning, students with high self-efficacy would think, “Although this task looks hard, I can do this. Therefore, I should push myself to successfully complete this task no matter how hard it may seem to me now.” On the other hand, students with high confidence may think, “I am sure I have done this correctly. Therefore I do not have to work hard on this nor do I have to reflect on my decision, because I already know I have done the right thing.” Students with high self-concept—another self-beliefs construct that has also been studied extensively—would think along the lines of “I am good at this and this is part of who I am. Therefore I can do this.”