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.