Since completing my Annotated Reference List and Theory Reflection, I’ve started to take note of the models and theories I am seeing in the literature so far.  At this point in time, I can see theory shaping my research and study in two separate, yet parallel ways.  The first is in how it will shape the content of my study, or in other words, the “what” of the study.  The second will be in the method, or the “how” of the study.  With regard to content, I’m focusing my study on students who “bounce back” from poor academic performance early in their college careers to become high achieving students as upperclassmen.  In particular, I’m focusing on the concept of academic buoyancy originally developed by Martin and Marsh (2008):

“Academic buoyancy has been defined as a capacity to overcome setbacks, challenges, and difficulties that are part of everyday academic life” (Martin, 2013, p. 488).

This emerging concept has its roots in educational psychology.  Martin and Marsh specifically mention positive psychology and the “broaden and build theory of positive emotions” (2006, p. 54).  According to the website for UNC’s Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab:

“Barbara Fredrickson developed the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions to explain the mechanics of how positive emotions were important to survival.  According to the theory, positive emotions expand cognition and behavioral tendencies.  Taking issue with the view that all emotions lead to specific action tendencies, the theory argues that positive emotions increase the number of potential behavioral options.”

Constructs that are highlighted in the literature in relation to academic buoyancy and its related concept, academic resilience, include motivation, engagement, self-efficacy, coping, and anxiety.

At the same time that I am very interested in developing a study around this concept of academic buoyancy, I do not come from an educational psychology background myself.   I may frame my research within a student development theory that acknowledges both the psychological/developmental aspect of buoyancy as well as the sociological/institutional role.  I’m particularly interested in Astin’s I-E-O Model and Theory of Involvement.  I like how it “occupies the middle ground between psychological and sociological explanations of student change” (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005, p. 53). I am also interested in Weidman’s Model of Undergraduate Socialization, which acknowledges the importance of non-institutional factors like parents, peers, employers and community organizations.  Finally, I have just started reading more about Schlossberg’s Transition Theory.  This may be particularly relevant to my study, with the focus on how adults react to an event (in my study, poor academic performance), their perception of the transition, individual and environmental factors, and their adaptation.

References

Martin, A. J. (2013). Academic buoyancy and academic resilience: Exploring ‘everyday’ and ‘classic’ resilience in the face of academic adversity. School Psychology International, 34(5), 488-500.

Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2008). Academic buoyancy: Towards an understanding of students’ everyday academic resilience. Journal of School Psychology, 46(1), 53-83.

Pascarella & Terenzini (2005). Chapter 2: Theories and Models of Student Change in College.

Since establishing a tentative research topic (academic resilience and “bouncing back” from poor academic performance), I have spent a lot of time doing literature searches in ERIC and PsycINFO.  The workshops I took at the library in the last month have definitely come in handy as I navigate my searches and save my potential sources in RefWorks.  I have also requested 3 books through interlibrary loan.  I’m excited to finally have a topic to focus on, but remain slightly daunted by the search process.

Regarding my topic, I started with “resilience” but soon came to realize that I needed to specify “academic resilience” since that is the aspect of resilience I am interested in.  I have subsequently set up a search in my databases, with email alerts, for “academic resilience” AND “college or university or higher education” AND student.  This has generated multiple journal articles which are at least slightly related to my topic.  My concern, however, is that they often focus on a particular group (for example, a certain ethnic group or at risk students) when I’m interested in a more generalist approach to the entire student body.  Also, I’m really interested in academic resilience in terms of students who “bounce back” from poor academic performance early on in their careers to become high achievers by the time they graduate.  One thing that my initial searches have suggested is that there may be a research gap in this area, which I hope signals a need for my study.

What is surprising and exciting about my search results so far is how many different journals are represented in my results.  I currently have articles related to academic resilience from the Journal of American College Health, Journal of Latinos and Education, Innovative Higher Education, the Chinese Journal of Psychology, and the Educational Forum, among others.  It seems that scholars are approaching this topic from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives, which I appreciate and hope will help me build a well-rounded literature review.  On the other hand, I think I may find it challenging to connect the dots, so to say, between the various studies and my own.

My next step is to begin reading my articles and create my annotated bibliography.  I will also try to map my literature as suggested in Chapter 2 in Creswell.  I think that will become essential as I try to organize my literature review section of my proposal.

Having selected a potential research topic, now I must select a research paradigm, and that seems almost as difficult.  From the moment we started reading about research paradigms, I knew selecting one would be a problem for me for two main reasons: (1) I have limited knowledge of research paradigms and methods at this point in my doctoral career, and (2) I really do value both quantitative and qualitative research.  In truth, if I selected a paradigm that best reflected my personal values, it would be the pragmatic paradigm.  That said, given that we are not allowed to select mixed methods (and knowing that I would be unprepared to tackle mixed methods research at this time), I must select either a postpositivist or constructivist paradigm.

If I studied “bouncing back” from a postpositivist, quantitative approach, I would be able to evaluate a larger sample of students and utilize data from current survey methods that are already employed at the university to see how their responses differ to their peers who don’t bounce back in terms of academic achievement.  In some ways, this could provide some essential data on the factors that are contributing to their success.  Are students from certain groups, majors, gender, socioeconomic status, etc, more likely to bounce back than others?  How quickly do they need to turn their academic performance around, measured by gpas, to ensure later achievement? Also, I could develop or use other survey methods to create questions that target this specific phenomenon.  I like the scope of this approach.

On the other hand, some of the richness of the experience would be lost if I focused solely on survey data.  If I employed a constructivist, qualitative approach, perhaps through a case study or narrative research, I could get a better understanding of the complexity, and timing, of the factors that influenced a student to make a turnaround.  My assumption at this point is that it is not one factor, but many, that cause students to bounce back.  Understanding how and when these factors interact seems a topic better suited to qualitative research designs.

I never would have expected it, but I think the most difficult aspect of this class will be selecting a research topic and research paradigm.  I have never felt so torn!  Well, maybe not never, but I feel as if I have been bouncing around among topics and I’m feeling frustrated.  I knew from the start that I wanted to focus on student success and persistence…but that is a wide topic and narrowing down my “piece of the pizza pie” has been challenging.  Here are some topics I have considered:

• Gender issues: How do the experiences of women in STEM and other majors where they are underrepresented (like Natural Resources and Management) differ from their peers in majors where women are the majority?
• Out-of-state students: This population is growing (currently at 13% of NCSU undergraduates).  Do they differ in their engagement, achievement or persistence when compared to similarly prepared in-state peers?  Do they face different challenges due to increased tuition costs, lack of a social network and not being in proximity to their  family?
• Increasing institutional graduation rates: How will/could we involve students in developing institutional plans for increasing our graduation rate?  Should students be part of this planning process, and if so, how do we engage them in it?
• Bouncing back and academic resilience: Why are some students able to “bounce back” from poor academic performance early in their college careers?  When most students do not bounce back, and either graduate with low gpas or even drop out, why are some students able to turn things around and even graduate with honors?  What are the personal and institutional factors that contribute to their success?

At this point, I think I will focus on the fourth topic listed above: Bouncing back from poor academic performance.  I believe it is an aspect of persistence worth studying, because we (as in administrators and faculty) should know how best to help students who stumble early on.  Many do, and it is too easy in a large institution to let them go, as Paul Simon said, “slip sliding away.”  Also, as I begin my research, I think there might be a knowledge gap on this topic which makes the research worth pursuing.  While there is a lot of research on academic and personal resilience, I have yet to find an article that specifically focuses on students who have exhibited poor academic performance followed by a significant and permanent turnaround.