The development of resilient behaviours in the fight against university academic dropout

Abstract

The events that the health pandemic has brought with in recent times have accentuated the importance of personal and emotional factors in the training trajectories of students. For this reason, the study of resilience has become an important topic in the context of higher education, given the importance of this ability to cope with adversity and academic stress. In relation to this topic, the objective of this research was aimed at verifying whether students with greater resilience capacities had lower intentions of abandoning university education. The initial hypothesis was that those students with a low level of academic resilience had a higher risk of failing and abandoning the studies they had started. Following an ex-post-facto quantitative research approach, a questionnaire was applied to a sample of (n=412) students from all undergraduate degrees at the Faculty of Education of the University of La Laguna. The results showed that students with higher levels of resilience show a higher intention to drop out and vice versa (less resilience, higher intention to drop out). At the same time, it was shown that a high percentage of students with low resilience expressed their intention to drop out, which highlights the predictive value of resilience in relation to academic performance. These results can help to have an understanding of the importance of this factor in the training trajectories of students, developing training and guidance actions that improve said competence and prevent situations of failure and academic dropout.