Why does resilience matter for student engagement?

We all want to find ways to support students in achieving their academic goals. This is central to one of the most important missions of universities – to educate future generations and produce graduates who are qualified to contribute to their chosen field and to society. Research suggests that student success is linked to academic engagement, or the degree to which students feel a connection and sense of belonging in the learning environment and how actively they participate in learning activities. Academic engagement is defined as a multidimensional construct, with cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects. Many students have difficulties that interfere with their engagement in education, so it is also important to understand the role of resilience in the face of adversity. A recent study in Studies in Higher Education examined which specific factors predict academic engagement, as well as whether resilience mediates the relationship between these factors and engagement.

The specific factors examined by the study were degree satisfaction, social integration, and self-regulation strategies. Degree satisfaction refers to a student's attitude based on perceptions of the educational experience in the student's chosen degree program. Social integration is a measure of the degree to which students have meaningful social connections with peers and instructors. Finally, self-regulation refers to the ability to regulate one’s thoughts, emotions, and behavior in striving toward a goal. All three factors positively predicted overall academic engagement, which the authors note underscores the multidimensional nature of academic engagement.

All students experience adversity to different degrees during their educational experience, and individuals vary in their ability to positively adapt in the face of challenges and recover from negative experiences. This ability is typically characterized as resilience. For each of the three factors, resilience mediated, or explained, the relationship with academic engagement. This suggests, for example, that having strong social connections may promote individual resilience for some students, and this resilience in turn supports greater engagement in the academic environment. Similarly, these results suggest that stronger self-regulation skills may also help students better handle difficulties they encounter in their academic journey, and again this resilience is an important contributor to academic engagement. Finally, the relationship with degree satisfaction suggests that when students are pleased with the program or department where they are studying, this may also contribute to resilience that they can bring to bear when faced with adversity to maintain engagement with their studies. Taken together, and consistent with previous research, the results show that individual resilience can help students transform resources and experiences into greater academic engagement.

The study was conducted in university classrooms in Spain, with the collaboration of instructors who allowed the researchers to introduce the study at the beginning of a lesson to a large group. Students who agreed to participate then used a QR code to access the online survey. This survey consisted of 68 items in total, including demographic information and measures of each concept ranging in length from 3 to 10 items. Each measure was assessed for reliability and validity, after which structural equation modeling was used to test study hypotheses. The sample was limited to younger, and mostly female, students of psychology or education, and the authors note the need to replicate the study with more diverse samples.

Comment: Apart from some methodological issues with the measurement instruments and the limited sample of students, the study raises some important issues. Specifically, the study highlights the importance of considering the dynamic interplay between psychological and social mechanisms that contribute to resilience and academic engagement. Perhaps most interestingly, the results were consistent with experiences I have had myself and with stories of similar experiences from my colleagues. How many wonderful stories of resilience have I heard? One former student from the US comes to mind. She came from a lower socioeconomic status background and was the first member of her family to attend college. Despite having earned a small scholarship, this made her university experience more challenging both financially and socially. The way she explained it, these challenges increased her motivation to do well because a university education was an opportunity she had always wanted but was not sure she would get. She was determined to make the most of the opportunity, and she did this in part by immersing herself in the learning experience, for example by taking optional courses to build study skills and by joining student groups that fit her interests and developing a peer support group. She did indeed to well, and is now a graduate student who will no doubt make valuable contributions to research in the future. Anecdotally, it does seem as though students who have the resilience to continue to pursue their academic goals after, or even while, experiencing adversity in their lives are particularly engaged in the learning experience. The contributing factors also ring true with my experience, in particular the importance of social integration.

Of course just relying on my own experience is flawed and biased, which is why it is important to conduct studies like this. This study is also interesting in that some of the same relationships examined at the university level are important factors throughout development, and particularly early in development. For example, self-regulation and social integration/support are key predictors of resilience in children who experience adversity and chronic stress early in development. The importance of both self-regulation skills and social integration take on particular significance in this age of changing digital habits and social media. For example, there is evidence for changes in aspects of self-regulation, in particular attention, in younger students, as well as changing norms for social interaction and integration. It would be interesting to expand the research, as the authors discuss, by designing and implementing interventions to build resilience in university students via strategies to improve both self-regulation and social integration. Such efforts could be particularly beneficial for students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, who are at greater risk for poorer self-regulation skills later in life. Interventions targeting these constructs would be consistent not only with the results from this study, but also from studies of early experience and brain development[MF1.1][EP1.2]. Even without a formal intervention, these results suggest that instructors can help students build resilience by creating multiple opportunities for social interaction and integration in the classroom, such as with regular small-group work where students have many opportunities to meet and engage with new students. Instructors can also suggest that students consider joining student organizations that fit their interests as another way of supporting social integration. The importance of self-regulation skills can also be discussed directly, and instructors can point students to resources that can help them develop these skills and practices, such as mindfulness techniques and study habits that focus on time planning and organization.

Text: Eric Pakulak, Department of Psychology

The Study
Galve-González, C., Castro-Lopez, A., Cervero, A., & Bernardo, A. B. (2026). Overcoming barriers: the role of resilience as a mediating factor in academic engagement. Studies in Higher Education, 51(2), 241–256.

Keywords: academic engagement, resilience, social integration, self-regulated learning,higher education