Performance and perception: A preliminary examination of factors that may motivate students to bounce back

This work in progress (WIP) uses a mixed methods approach to consider how student satisfaction and performance affect academic resilience. A previous study introduced a sink, struggle, and soar model to quantitatively assess positive adaptation after a poor exam performance. An underlying assumption was that quantitative measures of performance would align with a student's perception that they need to bounce back. However, some students who performed well by external standards still exhibited a strong desire to positively adapt, while other students who performed relatively poorly appeared unmotivated to adapt. In both scenarios, there appeared to be a mismatch between external measures of performance and internal perceptions. As part of an ongoing study of resilience, in this WIP we qualitatively and quantitatively examine student satisfaction with their performance. Preliminary data suggest that students with lower satisfaction than performance tend to focus on factors within their control when evaluating their performance. By contrast students with higher satisfaction than performance tend to attribute their low performance to external factors outside their control. As we continue to explore academic resilience, we hope that considering student satisfaction will provide insights into how to understand and help subpopulations in the classroom.