Confidence as a Predictor of Academic Success

Abstract

This study aims to determine the impact of confidence on academic performance in a cohort of first year psychology students. Intelligence is well understood as a key predictor of academic performance, however there are other factors which can contribute to a student’s success. Previous research highlights confidence as one of these potential factors. In order to distinguish confidence as a factor, participants completed a number of online measures and were asked to rank their confidence on each task. The tasks were the Mental-Rotation Task, a perceptual task, and the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, an established measure of intelligence. It was found that confidence was positively correlated with academic performance, however the strength of the relationship was weak, this was due to suppression effects caused by gender differences. It was found that although males had lower academic performance than their female peers, they were more confident when rating their own performance. These results build upon previous research by exploring the potential impact that confidence can have on academic performance. It also highlights the differences and similarities in performance on cognitive and non-cognitive tasks. This research has potential impact in education research and the capacity for further exploration of gender differences.