The relationship between academic resilience and sources of self-efficacy : investigation, intervention, and evaluation

Most low-achieving students continue to perform poorly throughout school. However, not all students remain on this achievement trajectory; a subset of initially low-achieving students appear to break this achievement pattern. This phenomenon is called academic resilience, a student’s capacity to overcome prior academic difficulty. The proposed study investigates low-income, low performing sixth-grade students, who will be classified into three groups based on their academic improvement in eighth grade: resilient (large improvement), buoyant (moderate improvement), and nonresilient (little or no improvement). The purpose of this study is to examine the differences among resilience groups on Bandura’s (1997) sources of self-efficacy as a function of sex and ethnicity, using a 3x3x2 MANOVA. The implications for the proposed study suggested the development of an intervention to cultivate the four sources of self-efficacy for low-performing students in order to increase academic resilience. This report also includes an evaluation plan, which outlines the essential components from a theoretical intervention program, a logic model for this program, and the proposed method to measure the reported outcomes.