To be referred to as “confident” is to be left in a quandary: is the label being offered as a compliment or as a criticism?

On one hand, confidence can be seen as impressive, sought after and a mark of achievement. On the other, it can be viewed as oppressive, something to be avoided and a sign of overreaching.

In schools, teachers tend to lean to the more positive interpretation. The common belief is that achievement builds confidence and vice versa. If you can get a pupil to experience success - pass a test, finish a project, abseil down a rock face- a positive cycle of increasing confidence and competence should, in theory, emerge.

But does confidence really work like that?

First, it’s important to stress the difference between the term “self-confidence” - which usually refers to a generally stable personality trait - and the more specific term “self-efficacy”.

Professor Albert Bandura, a Canadian-American psychologist, defines the latter as your belief in your ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. A person’s sense of self-efficacy, he says, can play a major role in how they approach goals, tasks and challenges.

There’s plenty of follow-up research to indicate that he is right. Studies suggest that students with higher self-efficacy are more persistent at working on difficult tasks and better able to find solutions to problems. Meanwhile, people with low self-efficacy are believed to give up more easily when dealing with difficult tasks and cannot concentrate on those tasks as well as others.

The result of differences in self-efficacy can lead, over time, to different levels of attainment, as those with higher self-efficacy take on challenges and learn to surmount them, while those with low self-efficacy do not and miss out on potential learning opportunities.

So, self-efficacy is definitely important. But what about self-confidence?

Self-confidence refers to a feeling of certainty that a person has while they are engaged in different kinds of activity, from answering general knowledge questions to problem solving or simply stating opinions. Research shows that these confidence levels are more stable across tasks (whereas self-efficacy can change between tasks).

Low confidence is obviously an issue that will concern most teachers: it can have a disastrous effect on a pupil’s willingness to try a task, and their ability to complete it, regardless of their ability in that task.

But what about overconfidence? Should teachers be concerned about this, too?

At first glance, the answer is no. Sabina Kleitman, associate professor of psychology at the University of Sydney, carried out research on undergraduate psychology students, asking them to solve four different cognitive tests and state their confidence levels as they were solving them.

“The good news is that, in general, confidence and accuracy are positively related and there are lots of studies to show that,” she says. “On average, people who do better on cognitive tasks, or smarter people, are also more confident people.

However, Kleitman says that people with overconfident tendencies tend to score more highly on certain personality traits, too, including “unrealistic optimism” (a sense that they are “luckier than others” ) and narcissism, which is characterised by a high degree of selfishness, a sense of entitlement, a need for admiration and a lack of empathy. They also score more highly on a lack of modesty and have high levels of self-esteem and extroversion.

“In combination, these personality characteristics and beliefs can give that person a high perception of confidence that they are doing much better than they are,” Kleitman explains.

In short, if a pupil is overconfident, they may think they are flying through the curriculum and put less work in as a result, when they really need to get their head down and do some studying.

So, like self-efficacy, confidence is also definitely important for learning outcomes.

With this in mind, how can we boost children with low self-efficacy and poor general confidence and how can we get those over- and under-optimistic characters to make a better assessment of their abilities?

First, some potential bad news: research on twins in Norway shows that 75 per cent of the variation in self-efficacy between two people is accounted for by their genes alone. But it is not all bad news for teachers, as researchers say the remaining variance, 25 per cent, is due to environmental influences not shared between family members.

Indeed, studies have shown that students’ confidence and test performance can be greatly undermined or manipulated by outside influences, including what teachers say. For example, US researchers took two groups of college students and made them sit a test. One group was told the test was designed for high-school students - something the researchers predicted would make them feel more confident about their ability to do well. The second group was told that the test was designed for top-flight, Ivy League students, with researchers predicting this might make them feel less confident in their ability to do well.

The researchers found that those who were told they were doing a test for Ivy Leaguers did indeed have lower confidence and performance than those told they were doing a test designed for high-school students.

The study report states: “The results … have confirmed that both academic confidence and academic performance are vulnerable to situational influences.” It adds that teachers and administrators need to be vigilant about how tests and quizzes are presented to students, and monitor their classroom atmosphere closely.

Meanwhile, a recent Scottish academic review seeking to find “take-home” messages for teachers from existing educational and psychological research confirms that - quite logically - helping children to develop expertise in a curricular area strengthens their self-efficacy within that domain.

It also confirms that it is effective to plan activities where learners must explain their reasoning and argue the case for the answers they give. It adds that teachers should also have a discussion with students about the importance of taking control of their own learning. Importantly, too, activities that encourage students’ metacognition - thinking about their own thinking and learning - should be routinely embedded into all lessons, says the study.

Kleitman agrees that we can assist pupils with their confidence and that, rather than trying to boost students’ confidence levels, the most effective approach is to deliberately train students to be able to make an accurate perception of their abilities.

She advocates providing opportunities for students to sit frequent formative assessments in which they are asked to assess their levels of confidence in their answers.

Students would then be provided with feedback about their changing performance and confidence levels within the test and across the tests over time. In this way, the students can gradually start to have a realistic level of confidence.

“In one study that I did with university students, we let them practise on many quizzes related to their exams and we asked them to give us confidence ratings within these quizzes,” says Kleitman. “Then we showed them their confidence biases, compared their confidence to other people’s confidence and stuff like that.

“That training is achieving something. It’s not that they had higher confidence, [but rather that] they had a reasonably calibrated confidence. You want to have confidence that is maybe exceeding your ability a little bit to give you a bit of leverage, but you don’t want it to be too far away from your achievement.”

So, confidence is important for pupils’ learning but influencing it is a balancing act, and teachers need to be experts in tipping the scales in just the right way to maximise performance. That is pretty tricky, but if you’re feeling just the right level of confidence in achieving it, everything will surely end up fine…

Irena Barker is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 5 June 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…confidence”