  Contributions: 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.
