Community Engagement, Love of Learning, and Religious Practice as Predictors of Elementary Students' Self-Confidence: Evidence from Indonesia's Seven Habits Framework

Abstract

Self-confidence is a foundational non-cognitive competency for children's academic and social development, yet international assessments continue to show Indonesian students trailing global benchmarks, prompting renewed policy attention to character-based, non-cognitive habit formation alongside cognitive instruction. This study tested whether community engagement, love of learning, and religious practice -- three of the habits foregrounded in Indonesia's national Seven Habits of Great Indonesian Children framework -- jointly and individually predict the self-confidence of Grade 5 elementary students. Using an ex post facto, associative quantitative design, data were collected via Likert-scale questionnaires from all 34 Grade 5 students (saturated sampling) at a public elementary school and analyzed with multiple linear regression in IBM SPSS Statistics 26. All three predictors significantly and positively predicted self-confidence: community engagement (B = 0.274, t = 2.093, p = .045, standardized beta = .281), love of learning (B = 0.452, t = 2.449, p = .020, standardized beta = .363), and religious practice (B = 0.559, t = 2.294, p = .029, standardized beta = .321). Love of learning emerged as the dominant predictor on the standardized metric. Together, the three variables significantly predicted self-confidence, F(3, 30) = 26.187, p < .001, explaining 72.4% of its variance (R-squared = .724; adjusted R-squared = .696). Diagnostic testing confirmed normally distributed residuals, no multicollinearity (tolerance > .42, VIF < 2.4 for all predictors), and no heteroscedasticity. The findings suggest that cultivating children's self-confidence benefits from a holistic, habit-based approach that integrates social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions rather than any single intervention, with implications for character-education policy in comparable elementary school systems worldwide