Explore Academic Resilience Across Countries: International or National Definition

• In Event: Unequal Opportunities and Unequal Outcomes: International Evidence

Abstract

Academic resilience refers to students’ capacity to perform highly despite a disadvantaged background. Although most international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) defined academic resilience with two criteria, student background and achievement, their conceptualization and operationalizations varied substantially. Considering measurement invariance, most studies in the field adopt a relative threshold to define student background, but when it comes to performance threshold, things are different. Some studies adopted an international definition, using an absolute threshold for student performance across countries, but some adopted a national definition, in which relative thresholds were used.
In order to explore the presence of academic resilience and the consistency of factors associated with academic resilience across countries, some researchers suggested to use the international definition. In order to provide more information about academic resilience in a specific country, national definition was recommended. However, some researchers also found that solely focused on international definition may result in overestimating resilience in some countries but underestimating in others. Therefore, our study sought to examine these two definitions and how they affect which students are classified as resilient in countries or economies participating in PISA 2015.
The composite index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status (ESCS) was used to define student background, and relative thresholds were adopted. Student performance in science was adopted to define outcome, and two types of thresholds (absolute and relative) were adopted.
The presence of academic resilience across countries will be examined through the proportions of resilient students, and the proportions of disadvantaged students who are resilient.
To examine the consistency of factors associated with resilience, we selected two most salient factors frequently associated with resilience: one is individual-level characteristic, student motivation; the other is school-level characteristic, school climate.
Two-level logistic regression was conducted, coefficients of these characteristics were examined between international and national definitions.
Our study revealed that, when fixed threshold was applied to outcome, the presence of resilience was heavily affected by the average student performance of the country.
When relative thresholds were applied to outcome, disadvantaged students who are resilient increased in low performing systems but decreased in high performing systems. Variation for both proportions of resilient students and proportions of disadvantaged students who are resilient minimized.
Motivation and school climate were significantly and positively associated with resilience in most countries. Significant test also indicated consistency for both characteristics between international and national definitions.

Authors

• Wangqiong Ye, University of Oslo

• Rolf Strietholt, TU Dortmund University

• Sigrid Blömeke, University of Oslo