What factors make boys or girls more resilient (or not) in STEM subjects?
We often talk about young people developing resilience across education. What is it? How do you teach it? How do pupils learn ‘how’ to overcome it?
Prior to the pandemic, Mark Quinn and I published our verbal feedback case study with UCL, alongside 7 state schools and 13 secondary school teachers.
At this time, Dr Sophie Hall contacted me to discuss STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teaching, pupil anger, and resilience – drawing upon some of the strategies used in the verbal feedback project.
After many edits, we finally published ‘A linguistic inquiry into the psychological processes associated with resilience in secondary school STEM learning‘ (March 2022).
I wanted to offer teachers a summary of the 24-page research I played a small part in …
Resilience has typically focused on the development of an individual’s strengths, leading to reduced vulnerability to adversity (Edwards, Lunt, & Stamou, 2010), and the term is increasingly being adopted into schools’ everyday language (Brown & Dixon, 2020)
Aims
The research aims were to examine resilience in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics(STEM) learning within an ecological model, identifying the psychological processes associated with resilient, and non-resilient learning to develop a framework for promoting STEM resilience.
This ecological approach was defined as: the ability to recover (Recovery), the ability to keep focused on goals (Ecological resilience), and the preference for new things, so able to naturally adjust (Adaptive capacity).
Methodology
From a sample of 4,936 secondary-school students in 9 UK schools, 1,577 were identified who found their STEM lessons difficult. Students were assessed on three resilience capabilities and asked to write a commentary on how they responded to the lesson.
The data was collected between September 2019 to January 2020. Pupils were aged 11-16 years old.
Conclusions
From the results, the research was able to identify key psychological processes that correlated with resilience, most notably, emotional processing. This enabled us to identify ‘anger’ as a key process that distinguished students who were able to easily ‘recover’ (high resilience) and those who could not (low resilience).
The discussion and conclusion are fairly detailed in the research, providing educators with a wide range of possibilities. The STEM gender gap is also highlighted and reinforced: “… a lack of STEM resilience may partly explain the gender gap as opposed to a lack of STEM ability.”
Note, two limitations with the research: 1) that socioeconomic status was not explored, and 2) the diversity sample could significantly be improved.
Our study provides further support for teacher education and continuing professional development to highlight the importance of nurturing classroom environments in which individual students feel that they are supported at the same time as being challenged by the subject matter.
Anger is a key process that distinguishes students who struggle to recover from a difficult STEM lesson. An ecological systems model may prove useful for understanding STEM resilience and developing intervention pathways. Implications for teacher education include the importance of students’ perceptions of teacher support.
Students may show resilience in some subjects (e.g., English), but not necessarily others (e.g., Maths). Indeed, research shows that children and young people show resilience to some life stressors but not others …
I believe that resilience is the single most impactful trait that a youngster must develop in their arsenal of skills, in order to reach their full potential.I would define resilience (in education) as fostering the ability to deal with the challenges, knocks and set backs in learning, through the explicit teaching a range of strategies, so that students ‘know what to do, when they don’t know what to do’.It has many links into various other aspects of teaching and learning including (but not limited to) areas such as relationships, cognitive load, resourcing of a lesson, worked examples, clear instructions, support materials, behaviour management as well wider whole school approaches and foci.I believe as DT is such a multifaceted and multi disciplined area of learning, this is what causes frustration and ‘anger’ within students. With many students wanting to blame themselves, the teacher, tools, equipment or even the subject for their lack of understanding.From my lived experience of teaching in international schools in Asia for the past 8 years, a vast range of other cultural factors also come in to play in this context which can sometimes exacerbate (and sometimes totally eradicate) the above.In our DT department, we develop resilience in our learners in a few simple ways. For example, our starters are based around low stakes / high gain recall and knowledge acquisition. In class demo’s are recorded (or pre-recorded) so that students can access them at their own pace. We have a physical worked example display of every stage of every main practical project we teach. Along side this sits a fully detailed step by step booklet.The above is then enhanced with teacher modelling of mistakes, thus reducing the fear of failure and getting something ‘wrong’… showing this as ‘learning something new’ not as a ‘mistake’.In our DT department we also have posters and a common language of what students must do if they’re stuck.A classic, but tweaked, enhanced and more detailed (7 stage) ‘3 before me’. This is not an easy transition for students, especially those that are over reliant on the teacher. But the key is using the strategies and having the ‘friendly stand-off’ with a student.All of this then frees up time in a lesson to address misconceptions and to work with those that need extra 1:1 input. I’ve certainly seen my current Y8 students developing those skills in the first part of the school year, and they’re now applying them with autonomy as we head into our second major project.This has been a long slog from a department level. A wise man (RMM) once told about the power of ‘collective teacher efficacy’ and the impact that all of the above could have, it were done by all within the institution.