Abstract

The aim of the study was to explore students’ perceptions of their academic resilience, as well as their positive activation, negative activation, and negative deactivation achievement emotions. Specifically, it sought to examine whether these concepts may be differentially associated with how students felt they were impacted at university during the Covid-19 restrictions. A total of 122 undergraduate students (89 female, 32 male, 1 non-binary; mean age = 19.76 years) completed self-report measures of their academic resilience, achievement emotions, and perceptions of how they were impacted by the Covid-19 restrictions regarding their well-being, changing learning environment, isolation, and assessment formats. End of year attainment data was also collected from official records.

All data was collected between April and June 2020 during lockdown in the UK. A series of linear regression models revealed that academic resilience was positively associated with coping better with the change of learning environment, well-being, and isolation during the Covid-19 restrictions. In addition, positive activation emotions (i.e., enjoyment, hope, pride) were related with higher reports of well-being during the restrictions, whereas negative activation emotions (i.e., anger, anxiety, shame) were related with lower well-being during the restrictions. Resilience and achievement emotions were found to have no association with actual end of year grades however, or the perceived impact of any changes to assessment formats.

While academic resilience was not found to explain university attainment, the findings of the study suggest that resilience may play a useful role in helping students well-being and ability to deal with the Covid-19 lockdown disruption. Developing strategies that foster higher resilience in student cohorts across the academic year may be beneficial in helping both well-being and the ability to deal with instances of major disruption to academic learning and teaching sessions.