Building Confidence in Hybrid Anatomy Learners

Human Anatomy's challenging content load can often undermine student confidence. We investigated how confidence correlates with academic performance and which confidence building strategies are perceived as impactful on academic performance. We predicted that multiple activities would impact students' confidence and learning and that most students would perceive the strategies as helpful. Self-doubt can hinder academic performance and affect career aspirations. Expectancy value theory holds that learners' expectation of success influences their willingness to pursue an educational goal and their persistence in doing so. As a result, students low in confidence may fall short of their potential and experience frustration. Participants were 38 Doctor of Physical Therapy students in a hybrid human anatomy course. We evaluated four learning and confidence-building strategies: AI-driven feedback, timely tutoring, frequent communication, and active learning assignments. Data analyses included correlation and comparison analyses of actual and predicted grades, and descriptive analyses of Likert scale questions on what was helpful in the course. Students increasingly underestimated their performance from midterm (34%) to the final exam (55%), while overestimation declined (29%-16%). High-performing students improved significantly more than average- and low-performing students (p < 0.001). High- and average-performing students continued to improve over time, whereas low-performing students showed minimal improvement over the course of the semester. Learning resources were highly valued by students, including tutoring (100%), frequent communication (94%), active learning (92%), and AI-driven feedback (93%). Student-predicted academic performance does not consistently align with actual scores. Most students are underconfident, but AI-driven feedback, tutoring, frequent communication, and active learning may be strategies to strengthen confidence, motivation, and engagement in learning anatomy.