Confidence in Learning - The Essential Missing Superpower in Education.
By Kelly Hutton
Learning meets confidence; Confidence meets learning. In the entirety of my career, the two elements have never been strictly referred to as being essential for each other, although we intrinsically understand that when you learn something and understand a concept, your confidence grows with it. However, I am talking not about confidence in the subject content you have been learning, but the deep-seated confidence that you know you CAN learn it, the perceived capability you have that you can do it; the motivation; the pride in your ability to learn; and that deep-rooted understanding of "I know I don't know this now, but I know that I will". That kind of confidence is an essential ingredient to stick with learning and the one that is often lost early on and is often overlooked.
The Core Mechanisms of Learning:
Confidence, especially academic self-efficacy, directly influences how children think, feel, and behave during learning. When children believe "I can do this", they are more willing to try, more able to persist, and more likely to use effective learning strategies. There are a few core mechanisms which explain this;
Confidence strengthens motivation and self-regulation
When a child has a higher self-efficacy - the belief in themselves that they can do something- they demonstrate intrinsic motivation, which promotes better planning and more effective self-regulation. They engage more deeply, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies when things get difficult. Gonzalez-Suarez et al. (2026) explains how self-regulated learning predicts a child's ability, as negative emotions such as anger and shame directly impact their ability to monitor and self-reflect, essential skills in directing where the learning needs to go and how you can see it through to the end. Confidence negates these negative emotions, allowing learning to thrive.
Confidence mediates the link between wellbeing and achievement
Confidence in your ability to learn acts as a bridge between emotional wellbeing and academic performance. Children who feel emotionally secure will have higher self-efficacy, and that confidence. The research undertaken by Zhang & Chen (2025) supported this, demonstrating that confidence becomes a predictor of learning achievement.
Confidence grows from relational support and feedback
Children's confidence is ultimately shaped by the messages they are constantly receiving from adults, inside and outside of the classroom. Schlichtenhorst (2026) has some insight into this through a study which did a systematic review of socioeconomically disadvantaged students and found that interventions which are designed to enhance academic self-efficacy had positive outcomes for students. Supportive relationships, structured feedback, and opportunities to reflect on progress all strengthen self-efficacy when done consistently.
Confidence is one of the strongest predictors of achievement
The research behind this is pretty conclusive, with one such research piece by Basileo et al. (2024) showcasing how, among motivation factors, self-efficacy consistently shows the largest association with academic outcomes. It even mediates the effects of autonomy, teacher support, and basic psychological need satisfaction, which in themselves are all pretty essential for successful learning.
Why It Matters
We do have to wonder why, in early education at least, there isn't a bigger focus on self-efficacy - the belief that we are all capable of learning- as the primary objective for our children's learning. Across the research, educational psychology is extremely clear that this confidence in our ability to learn is not just an outcome of learning, but that confidence is the driver of learning.
When children feel capable, we know that they:
take more risks and explore more deeply.
They persist through challenge rather than withdrawing.
They use more effective learning strategies.
They interpret mistakes as part of learning rather than personal failure.
Their emotional wellbeing improves, which further strengthens learning.
This creates a positive feedback loop: confidence -> engagement -> achievement -> more confidence.
For all of us involved in helping children to learn, this means that building confidence shouldn't be "soft" work, but essential core instructional work, and this is why I am so passionate about project-led learning, because it does exactly this: the core instructional work that every child needs.
Why The Brilliant Ideas Method (BIM), As A Structure for Project-Led Learning Underpins Confidence
The Brilliant Ideas Method is structurally designed exactly for this purpose: to build self-efficacy, the strongest predictor of academic achievement according to the research, meaning that this educational approach, whose core aim is to strengthen self-efficacy, is not simply "helpful"; it is transformational for learning outcomes.
It does this in four, deeply research-aligned ways:
It explicitly teaches the core sources of self-efficacy.
Bandura (1986;1997) identified the sources of self-efficacy as mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal/social persuasion and emotional states, and BIM incorporates all four of these by:
Mastery experiences through structured drafting, documenting and reviewing, so children can see their progress and success.
Vicarious experiences through collaborative thinking and shared planning; working with others, other children or their adult, they observe and learn.
Verbal/social persuasion through echoing; the adults reinforce capability by describing back what the child has achieved
Emotional regulation through predictable routines and flexible thinking, reducing anxiety, which otherwise undermines self-efficacy.
This makes the method not just compatible with self-efficacy theory, but it makes it operational on a level that is achievable, with a structure which gives clear guidance on how to underpin that confidence in learning.
It strengthens the basic psychological needs that feed self-efficacy
We discussed earlier how adult support for autonomy, competence and relatedness (those basic psychological needs) predicts autonomous motivation and achievement, and how it is positively associated with self-efficacy. The BIM's foundation is based on the fact that children choose and define their own projects, giving them autonomy. Planning allows tasks to be broken down into micro-actions, reducing the cognitive load and enabling competence. The opportunities for collaboration, echoing, and sharing vocabulary create belonging and connection, which allows for relatedness.
It builds on executive function skills that make self-efficacy possible
As self-efficacy is future-oriented: it is the belief "I can succeed in this task" Executive functions, that is, planning, organisation, working memory, flexible thinking, and self-monitoring, are all cognitive tools that children will need to be able to act on that belief.
The BIM explicitly teaches these skills through:
Planning → Choose & Define
Organisation & working memory → Drafting, grouping, documenting
Task initiation → Micro‑actions
Sustained attention → Weekly task boards
Reflection & self‑monitoring → Reviewing and echoing
Flexible thinking → Collaborative decision‑making
Because self-efficacy predicts deeper learning strategies and how these can transfer to new contexts, strengthening executive function skills creates a reinforcing loop: better EF -> higher self-efficacy -> better learning -> stronger EF.
It creates motivational conditions that self-efficacy mediates
Whilst the research is telling us that autonomous motivation predicts achievement and controlled motivation predicts lower achievement, self-efficacy mediates both; it is the mechanism through which motivation becomes achievement. Therefore, we want to promote autonomous motivation.
The BIM does this by:
Giving children meaningful choice
Connecting learning to identity
Providing a predictable, brain-friendly structure
Reducing cognitive load
Making learning feel achievable and purposeful
Autonomous motivation and self-efficacy are in a reciprocal relationship; the method strengthens both simultaneously.
The Brilliant Ideas Method is one of the few educational approaches that explicitly teaches the cognitive skills underpinning self-efficacy, embedding the psychological needs that support it, using language and routines which reinforce it and structures learning in a way that makes mastery visible and achievable.
Self-efficacy is not a by-product of the Brilliant Ideas Method; it is the outcome the method is designed to produce, and it is available to you from January 2027. If you want to introduce a method which will really bring confidence to your child's ability to learn, the Brilliant Ideas Method is the place to start.
The toolkit comes with a full guidance e-book, a project workbook resource, you get three cycles of expert guidance and advice from an experienced educator to answer all your questions and guide you along the way and a resource toolkit with everything you need to get you on your way. It is currently available for a pre-order discount of £50 by clicking the link below.
Self-efficacy, the confidence to know you can learn, is arguably the most underrated, neglected element in Education, but it doesn't have to be when you have the tools to help foster it.
References
Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. 1st Edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. 1st Edn. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Basileo, L. D., Otto, B., Lyons, M., Vannini, N., & Toth, M. D. (2024). The role of self-efficacy, motivation, and perceived support of students’ basic psychological needs in academic achievement. Frontiers in Education, 9, Article 1385442. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1385442
González‑Suárez, R., Díaz‑Pita, L., & Rodríguez Martínez, S. (2026). Self-efficacy, value, and hope: Key motivational predictors of self-regulatory behaviors in elementary school students. Acta Psychologica, 264, 106538.
Schlichtenhorst, J. (2026). School-based interventions to enhance academic self-efficacy in secondary education: A systematic review emphasizing socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1740924
Zhang, T., & Chen, X. (2025). The mediating role of learning self-efficacy in the relationship between subjective well-being and academic performance in children. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1570068. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1570068
Comments