  Software architecture students, often, lack self-confidence in their ability
to use their knowledge to design software architectures. This paper
investigates the relations between undergraduate software architecture
students' self-confidence and their course expectations, cognitive levels,
preferred learning methods, and critical thinking. 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. We found that
self-confidence is weakly associated with the students' critical thinking and
independent from their cognitive levels, preferred learning methods, and
expectations from the course. The results suggest that to improve the
self-confidence of the students, the instructors should work on improving the
students' critical thinking capabilities.
