Abstract
Academic resilience is a student's ability to achieve academic results significantly higher than would be expected according to their socioeconomic level. In this study, we aimed to identify the characteristics of students, families, and teacher activities which had the greatest impact on academic resilience. The sample comprised 117,539 fourth grade students and 6,222 teachers from 4,324 schools in member states of the European Union that participated in the PIRLS 2016 study. We specified a two-level hierarchical linear model in two phases: in the first level we used the students' personal and family background variables, in the second level we used the variables related to teaching activity. In the first phase we used the complete model for all countries and regions, in the second phase we produced a model for each country with the highest possible number of statistically significant variables. The results indicated that the students' personal and family variables that best predicted resilience were the reading self-confidence index, which increased the probability of student resilience by between 62 and 130 percentage points, a feeling of belonging to the school, which increased the chances of being resilient by up to 40 percentage points, and support from the family before starting primary school (Students from Lithuania who had done early literary activities in the family setting were twice as likely to be resilient than those who had not). The teaching-related factors best predicting resilience were keeping order in the classroom, a safe and orderly school environment (increasing chances of resilience by up to 62 percentage points), and teaching focused on comprehension and reflection, which could increase the probability of resilience by up to 61 percentage points.
Highlights
Evaluations of education systems are a key tool for describing the development of students’ skills and how schools help in improving learning [1]
The countries with the highest proportions of resilient students, according to the estimations produced from the definition of resilience used in this study, were Poland (42.22%) and Italy (40.57%)
Our results show that the weight of the predictor variables in academic resilience varied considerably between countries, which may be, as Mullis, Martin, Goh, & Prendergast [75], noted, due to social and cultural differences, and the differences between different countries’ education systems
Summary
Evaluations of education systems are a key tool for describing the development of students’ skills and how schools help in improving learning [1]. Identifying the contextual factors of the teaching process that have the greatest impact on academic performance may help to prevent school failure, and may help to guide policy decisions towards the continual improvement of the education system [2,3,4,5]. It is possible to download the supporting documents (User Guide and Supplements files) to replicate the analyzes
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