One of the best predictors of student performance is an individual’s belief or confidence that s/he possesses the necessary abilities and skills to complete a task within a context.  Confidence is a key psychological variable and most frequently conceptualized as self-efficacy.  A new construct related to confidence is core-confidence, conceptualized as a higher-order core construct that influences four manifestations, including hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and resilience (Stajkovic, 2006).  Confidence is a key determinant to whether one will unleash existing potential, or hold it internally captive (Stajkovic, 2006).  A confident individual is one who knows what to do, how to do it, holds positive future outcome expectations, and can bounce back from suboptimal outcomes.

Despite the vast body of research suggesting that one’s confidence belief is the single best predictor of human performance, there is little evidence of its implementation in real world training environments.  To optimize training performance, training systems designs must incorporate an understanding of the changes in one’s confidence beliefs and how those beliefs affect performance outcomes.  In this study, we utilize subjective measures of state-based core-confidence, and objective measures of Training Effectiveness (TE), which is measured through a combination of task-performance and physiological data.  The main research question we seek to answer is whether simulated training environments contribute to a false overconfidence that transfers into live environments, ultimately affecting performance outcomes.  To understand the role of state-based core-confidence in training effectiveness framework, we associate it with our TE measures to determine how it changes through the training, how it varies between simulated and live flight environments, and how its changes affect subsequent performance in both environments. 

Our study assesses state-based core-confidence to validate if it can be used as a deterministic variable for designing the fidelity of simulation-based training devices.