Steven Weigler and Ray Henderson with ScholarCentric and V. Scott Solberg of Boston University School of Education have looked at what skills the students who are successful in school had, whether they were from highly educated, successful homes in good schools or from lower SES homes and less successful schools – and conversely, what skills the unsuccessful ones lacked. They refer to the cluster of skills as resilience.

Solberg is an educational psychologist who has been studying what factors into school success and academic self-efficacy for many years.

Why focus on building academic resilience? An unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind is a ballooning dropout rate. Because schools are punished for the students who do not pass high stakes testing, administrators know that if the student isn’t there the whole year it doesn’t count against them. So they have strong incentives to create an environment that does not nurture or encourage those students who they know probably will not pass and as a result encourages them to drop out.

In fact, administrators know it is not in their best interests for the students to stay in school.
The primary predictors of which students will succeed in college are non-cognitive skills. Connections are important to it too, with the student feeling connected to their family, their teachers, and their peers. If you want a kid to come to school, it’s that connection that is key to their motivation and finding it meaningful to do so. Some of these factors are the very same predictors of their ability to be successful at any level of their education: attendance, course grades, and behavior reports. Another surprisingly accurate predictor is whether or not the student believes college is important. Do they value education and find it relevant to their life? The ability of the student to manage stress, to manage their health and sense of well-being regardless of their circumstances, to develop feelings of connectedness and confidence, and whether they find school meaningful, are all key to students being resilient. That brings improved engagement, achievement, and graduation rates.

“What does the resilient person look like? They can communicate, they can explain to you — and they’re not letting you go until they are done, by the way. I mean, they’ve got things to say to you. And they’re doing it in a way that demonstrates the introspection as well as the process that they’ve gone through in understanding. And when you interview for a job, you get hired.”

V. Scott Solberg

A study out of Philadelphia found that high school graduates and dropouts showed that within six years the two groups had the same economic outcome, which limited their choices in life to a very narrow range of options, lower income. Only those with some kind of post-secondary degree or certificate have an expanded range of options and economic opportunity. It can be two-year or four-year, but some kind of post-secondary pathway is required for individuals to have some kind of economic success. So resiliency is important.

Longitudinal studies show that those not in school and not in the workforce cost taxpayers $1.56 trillion dollars in direct costs – but indirect costs are there too. If you are unemployed and end up in the hospital, someone has to pay the bill. If you are in jail, someone has to pay. The other consideration is that those who dropout or even just stop after high school are not developing so they never realize their potential. When you factor all of those costs in, the cost to taxpayers mounts to a staggering $4.75 trillion.

 So if you are working to help students develop the resiliency skill sets, not only will they improve academically but that whole college- and career-readiness improves, along with their goal-setting, identify the learning opportunities, and realize those goals. Measuring the degree to which students have or lack each of those resiliency-related skills allows appropriate interventions to be developed to help students gain those skills. Academic self-efficacy is the pathway. A number of skills are involved in that: the ability for a student to read their textbooks, study for tests, ask questions in class, and so forth. So how do teachers help students start developing those non-cognitive skills? It takes being willing to share from their own life stories about times when they weren’t confident, for example, and how they grew and got better at that. About three sessions of that kind of open sharing seems to be needed for students to get comfortable doing that and to begin in talking honestly about their own similar feelings and experiences, according to Solberg. Those conversations were key to making students feel that sense of belonging in their school.