Introduction to the special section on the development of motivational resilience in school

How do children and adolescents develop the tools they need to deal constructively with the challenges, obstacles, and setbacks they encounter daily in their academic work? Why are some students able to “bounce back” in the face of everyday stressors, and engage in learning activities with renewed vigor? Why do others respond with discouragement and disaffection? And what are the best ways for schools, families, and friends to support students in developing such capacities? The conviction that these are important questions is shared widely by researchers who study a range of social, developmental, and educational processes, including academic resilience, mastery versus helplessness, engagement and reengagement, coping, self-regulated learning, adaptive help seeking, and emotion regulation, as well as buoyancy, tenacity, perseverance, and productive persistence. However, research in most of these areas is conducted in relative isolation from work in other areas, and studies are not always cast within developmental or social-contextual approaches. As a result, although we have many pieces of the puzzle, it has been difficult to identify the intervention levers most effective in helping students to develop a rich and flexible repertoire of effective responses for dealing with academic challenges and problems – especially during specific age-graded windows.

The overarching goal of this special issue is “field building” on this intriguing topic. We bring together researchers from across disparate areas in order to underscore the common ground they share in their focus on students’ motivational resilience and vulnerability, which we define broadly as patterns of action that allow students to deal constructively with, overcome, recover, and learn from encounters with academic obstacles and failures (Martin & Marsh, 2009; Skinner & Pitzer, 2012; Yeager & Dweck, 2012). This umbrella term reminds researchers that, even if these phenomena have largely been studied separately up to now, all these processes are in play on the ground when students actually encounter challenges and problems in their schoolwork. Within each of these subareas, we highlight lines of conceptual and empirical work that are explicitly developmental and social-contextual. By this, we mean that they rely on developmental conceptualizations or use longitudinal or time-ordered data to trace age-graded differences, changes, or trajectories of motivational resilience and examine the personal and interpersonal factors that contribute to the development of motivational resilience over time.

Under this umbrella, the study of motivational resilience and vulnerability lives at the intersection of many large and loosely related subfields in developmental and educational science (e.g., academic resilience, self-regulated learning, and tenacity, help seeking). It differs from work in any one of these subfields in two ways. First, it examines how these social and individual processes operate under stress, that is, when students run into trouble in their academic work. Encounters with challenging or stressful demands may “knock students down.” They can no longer rely on automatic responses, and under these conditions, actions and emotions are not easy to coordinate. Stressful encounters can trigger emotional or stress reactivity, enhance or interfere with cognitive functioning, narrow or scatter attention, activate action tendencies, and propel students deeper into challenging educational tasks or send them running away. In other words, stress requires students to reorganize their motivational, regulatory, and social resources and to more intentionally deploy their actions if they are to deal effectively with heightened academic demands.

Second, motivational resilience and vulnerability focus on actual responses (including emotions and goal-directed behaviors) that emerge on the ground as part of episodes during which students are dealing with academic problems. Patterns of action can be distinguished from the underlying neurobiological, psychological, and social subsystems (e.g., belief systems, skill sets, and social relationships) that give rise to them. From this perspective, motivational resilience can be seen as a coordinating concept that provides a home for all the sets of processes that allow students to “rebound,” “bounce back,” remain “buoyant,” or “reengage” constructively in the face of academic challenges and problems.

Overview of the Special Section

This special section consists of a conceptual review and five empirical papers. The purpose of the review, subtitled “I get knocked down but I get up again,” (Skinner, Graham, Rickert, Brule, & Kindermann, 2020), is to suggest some basic parameters for this emerging field. We summarize work from nine subareas that share a common interest in motivational resilience and vulnerability and show how each one can contribute to a time-ordered account of the way these processes unfold when students encounter academic problems or obstacles. It is our contention that these nine areas have much in common but are also complementary, in that gaps or blind spots in each can be shored up by the strengths of other approaches. The review concludes with specific suggestions for potential conceptual and empirical cross-fertilization.

Taken together, the five empirical papers, from researchers working in Australia, the United Kingdom, Korea, Portugal, and the U.S., highlight the promise of research focusing on motivational resilience. Studies examine many different kinds of academic adversity, demands, and stressors, ranging from disaffection, poor performance, demanding schoolwork, and difficulty understanding material to misconduct, learning problems, and major life events. Researchers also emphasize a range of important target constructs, including buoyancy, agency, engagement, coping, and reengagement. Studies also illustrate multiple ways to capture resilience: through studying “bounce back” directly as buoyancy or reengagement, by tracing recovering trajectories of engagement, or by examining processes that confer resilience or vulnerability, such as adaptive coping or autonomy-supportive interventions. Researchers bring development to the table through a range of interesting longitudinal design strategies, including cross-lag panel, multi-wave, and growth curve studies, within single school years or across multiple years. Their focus on social contexts can be seen in the examination of the role of teachers and peers and in the variety of factors studies incorporate, including personal assets and liabilities (e.g., perceived control, autonomy, and catastrophizing) as well as interpersonal resources (e.g., teacher provision of involvement, structure, and autonomy support, or peer groups’ reengagement) and hindrances (e.g., students’ experiences of autonomy dissatisfaction and frustration, or teacher rejection, chaos, and coercion).

Empirical Papers

The first paper in this special section is authored by Martin and Marsh, whose work on academic buoyancy and everyday academic resilience (Martin & Marsh, 2008, 2009) has set a high bar for all research in this area. In the current study, Martin and Marsh (2020) use a cross-lagged panel design spanning two consecutive school years to explore the potentially reciprocal effects between high school students’ academic buoyancy and the adversity they experience. As usual, these researchers have put their finger on a key issue: If students experiencing low levels of adversity show increases in subsequent buoyancy, at the same time that those high in buoyancy show decreases in the adversity they subsequently experience, then these feedforward and feedback loops may together reflect a pattern of virtuous or vicious cycles that can shape trajectories of motivational resilience during this developmental period.

The second paper, by Lemos, Gonçalves, and Cadima (2020), maps motivational resilience by charting normative trajectories of engagement over three measurement points, encompassing the transition from 9th to 10th grade (from basic to secondary school). Researchers then use latent class growth analysis to identify subgroups of students whose engagement takes distinctive pathways. This article showcases a promising methodological strategy for capturing the development of resilience by using engagement and its predictors to distinguish groups of students whose motivation seems to be recovering from the normative losses typical across school transitions.

In the third empirical paper, Reeve, Cheon and Yu (2020) build on their earlier work testing complex models of mediational predictions made by self-determination theory (Jang, Kim, & Reeve, 2012). In this study, they focus on the concept of “agentic engagement” (Reeve, 2013) and investigate the role of teacher autonomy support in promoting the development of engagement over time. Using three time points of data to test a multilevel structural equation model, this study shows how process-oriented accounts of agency and autonomy can help us identify the intervening steps through which social contexts shape action outcomes.

The fourth paper, by Skinner and Saxton (2020), focuses on the normative development of academic coping during late elementary and early middle school (age: 8–13) and explores whether age/grade differences and changes in students’ use of multiple adaptive and maladaptive strategies differ for those whose development takes place under differing motivational conditions. Building on earlier work on individual differences in coping (Gonçalves, Lemos, & Canário, 2018; Pitzer & Skinner, 2017; Skinner, Pitzer, & Steele, 2013), this study shows how a pattern-centered approach can more wholistically capture the combinations of personal and interpersonal assets and vulnerabilities that together are likely to shape the development of academic coping.

The fifth empirical paper focuses on an underappreciated social partner in research on academic motivation and engagement, namely, students’ peers (Kindermann, 2016; Vollet, Kindermann, & Skinner, 2017). Using data from fall and spring of the first year of middle school (grade 6, age: 12–13), Vollet and Kindermann (2020) examine the role peer groups play in shaping changes in students’ academic re-engagement (i.e., their capacity to rebound in the face of academic problems or failure) and whether such influences are stronger from peers on whom students can consistently rely. This study reminds researchers that students’ peers may have access to additional resources that individual students do not. As a result, peer groups can be a source of support as children and adolescents struggle to “bounce back” and persist in the face of academic difficulties.

Future Research

The conceptual review and all five empirical papers end with recommendations for next steps in the study of the development of motivational resilience and vulnerability. We would highlight three overarching ideas. First, investigators would do well to consider research outside of their direct lines of sight. The integrative review nominated work from nine areas, all of which have the potential to enrich the conceptual and empirical efforts of any of their neighbors. Second, a renewed focus on what happens to all these processes under conditions of challenge or threat cautions researchers that they may be exploring motivational, regulatory, or social processes that are qualitatively different from those seen in non-stressful transactions. These emerging processes may involve first lines of defense, fallbacks, recruitment of reinforcements, and tactical retreat, as students reorganize their resilience resources to deal with “trouble” or “resistance” in their academic work. Third, we think that developmental and social contextual approaches have much to offer future work on the umbrella construct of motivational resilience and vulnerability, drawing our attention to the neurophysiological, psychological, and social underpinnings of students’ patterns of action during stressful episodes. These predictors have long historical roots in ongoing relationships and previous experiences with academic failures and setbacks, and the actions they orchestrate unfold in complex social ecologies that can differ from student to student, even in the same classroom. Taken together, we see this special section as part of initial efforts at “field building” on this crucial topic and we look forward to the many directions this work may take.