Academic buoyancy
Academic buoyancy refers to a student’s ability to successfully navigate the minor setbacks typically encountered in everyday schooling, such as poor performance on an assessment, maintaining positive relationships with classmates, receiving critical feedback from a teacher, or missing the selection for a competitive team.
There are five key motivational predictors of academic buoyancy, known as the 5-Cs:
Confidence: a student’s belief in their ability to succeed.
Composure: a student’s ability to maintain calm and manage anxiety.
Commitment: a student’s dedication and ability to persevere throughout challenging learning.
Coordination: a student’s ability to plan, organise, and manage their learning.
Control: a students' perception of their influence over their academic success.
Academic buoyancy is not about dealing with the severe and enduring adversity that can affect an individual, but rather the everyday challenges and obstacles that can be overcome with a positive and determined mindset and every-day resilience strategies. These strategies include:
Addressing fear of failure: students any identify negative emotions and engage in positive self-talk.
Developing courageous and constructive responses to failure: students reconceptualise failure as part of the learning process including identifying what went wrong, taking responsibility for mistakes and trying again.
Emphasising growth: students set goals to maximise opportunities for success.
Communicating high expectations: teachers provide achievable but challenging learning activities
Providing specific and consistent feedback: Teachers provide specific and consistent feedback that is focused on students’ effort or process.
Providing relevant learning activities**:** teachers share with students the purpose of what they are learning.
Creating a conducive classroom climate: teachers create a classroom climate that emphasises cooperation over competition and where all students feel comfortable taking risks, making mistakes and asking questions.
Fostering sense of belonging to school: everyday resilience is supported by a school climate which emphasises inclusion in learning and activities and which makes students feel safe and welcomed. When students feel safe and encouraged at school, they may be better able to navigate any setbacks or challenges they encounter.
Academic buoyancy represents the capacity to overcome the everyday challenges at school and for students to keep focused as motivated learners and participants in school activities. Academic buoyancy is important as it directly impacts on a student’s achievement and enjoyment of school.