Resilience in higher education students: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

The health, wellbeing and employability of university students are key considerations within higher education. In response, interest in student resilience is on the rise. Reviews of contemporary resilience literature highlight both conceptual and methodological weaknesses, issues which hamper attempts to design effective resilience interventions. To inform the design of a student resilience program, to be piloted at three Australian universities, a scoping review of resilience specific to the higher education context was undertaken. Searches of three electronic databases (PsychINFO, CINAHL and ProQuest) were conducted. Seventy-two peer-reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2017 were included in the review. While the review reaffirms the conceptual and methodological issues found in previous resilience research, it provides a useful critique of key issues in relation to university student resilience and interventions to enhance students’ resilience. Recommendations for educators and researchers are provided.     

Relating early childhood teachers’ working conditions and well-being to their turnover intentions

High turnover rates of early care and education teachers reduce the quality of education; unsatisfied teachers, suffering from stress or emotional exhaustion, are less equipped to promote children’s development and more likely to leave the classroom. We used data from a national survey of US early childhood educators (n?=?1129) to examine associations between teachers’ working conditions, well-being, and motivation with professional commitment and turnover intentions to move, leave, or remain. Multiple regression analyses revealed that more intrinsically motivated teachers were more likely to report intentions to move over leave, emotionally exhausted teachers were more likely to report intentions to leave, and lower teacher-reported working conditions predicted intentions to move or leave the field over staying. The results suggest that teachers’ well-being and perceived working conditions relate with their intentions to remain at their job or within the field and to their commitment to the profession.     

Relationships matter: some benefits,challenges and tensions associated with forming a collaborative educational researcher group

Growing recognition of the complexity of children’s lives has led to strong advocacy in education research literature for greater collaboration between researchers from different paradigms to address the ‘wicked’ problems that face contemporary children and families. There is little literature, however, exploring how collaboration works in practice. This paper, drawing on researcher reflective narrative, and using Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a heuristic framework, describes and critiques the formative stages of an educational research collaborative group of five early and one mid-career early childhood education researchers (the authors), from two universities, and with quite different epistemological and ontological understandings. It outlines, from an insider perspective, some of the outcomes, challenges and tensions associated with participating in the research group, and concludes by providing some implications for policy and considerations for those contemplating forming a collaborative group.     

Inhibitory Control as a Contributor to Conscience in Childhood: From Toddler to Early School Age

In this article we report a longitudinal extension of previous findings about the critical role of temperamental inhibitory or effortful control as the contributor to developing conscience in young children. A comprehensive observational battery, highly internally consistent, was developed to measure inhibitory control in 83 children at early school age who had been followed since toddlerhood and had been assessed using similar batteries at toddler and preschool age. We again confirmed the findings of robust longitudinal stability of inhibitory or effortful control, now from toddler to early school age, the increase with age, and gender differences, with girls outperforming boys. We also reaffirmed strong links, both contemporaneous and in the longitudinal sense, between in hibitory control and multiple, diverse measures of children's conscience at early school age, including observations of moral conduct, moral cognition, and moral self. The findings are discussed in view of the increasingly appreciated importance of temperament for critical aspects of socialization.     

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT IN TEXAS TWO-YEAR COLLEGES

To discover the organizational components that nurture good teaching in Texas two-year colleges, I undertook the task of replicating a study of Ohio two-year colleges. A review of the literature uncovered several variables for assessing faculty development. The most important of these appears to be an institutional climate that encourages faculty development. To assess faculty development, a 65-item survey was sent to all Texas two-year colleges. Although the results of the Texas study are more encouraging than those of the Ohio study, Texas community colleges could be doing more to support faculty development.     

New Technology and Educational Television

The first part of the article provides a historical account of the broad phases of development that educational television has passed through as a result of social and technological influences:

• its beginnings in broadcasting in the fifties and sixties;

• its development through the video age in the seventies and eighties, with widening scope and opportunity as a result of developments in production and reception/recording equipment and an expansion of communication channels;

• its present potential, at the dawn of the interactive age, as a result of the influences of new technology.

The article then examines the problems of integrating new television‐related technologies into the educational system and draws attention to:

• the frequent past failures of the educational system to fully exploit new technologies, resulting in superficial integration and ineffectual use;

• the current tensions between the traditional educational technology approach and the drives behind much new technology;

• the need for appropriate systems and structures to ensure that the evaluation of such new technologies is properly resourced and effectively carried out.

     

Family patterns and child abuse in a nationally representative American sample

Data on 1, 146 families with a child age 3 through 17 at home are presented. Child abuse information was obtained for a randomly selected child in each family. Child abuse was defined as an attack by a parent involving punching, kicking, biting, hitting with an object, “beating up,” or using a knife or gun. Over 14 out of every 100 American children 3–17 are subjected to abusive violence each year. These figures are at least 26 times greater than those of the National Center For Child Abuse and Neglect. Even so, for reasons outlined in the paper, they are underestimates. Families in which child abuse occurred are compared with other families. The results suggest that child abuse is brought about by the very nature of the society and its family system. This has profound implications for the prevention and treatment of child abuse. Although psychotherapy may be appropriate in some cases, a more fundamental approach lies in such things as a more equal sharing of the burdens of child care, replacement of physical punishment with non-violent methods of child care and training, eliminating the stresses and insecurity which now characterize our economic system, and strengthening the ties of individual families to the extended family and the community.     

Potentiation and overshadowing between landmarks and environmental geometric cues

Rats were required in three experiments to find one of two submerged platforms that were situated in the same pair of diagonally opposite corners of a rectangular grey swimming pool. The experimental groups were trained with landmarks, comprising A4 cards attached to the walls, located in the corners containing the platforms. For the control groups, the landmarks were situated in the corners containing the platforms for half of the trials, and in the other corners for the remaining trials. Learning about the positions of the platforms with reference to the shape of the pool was overshadowed in the experimental groups when the landmarks were white, and enhanced when the landmarks were black. A fourth experiment assessed whether geometric cues influenced the control acquired by the landmarks. As in the previous experiments, the presence of the geometric cues overshadowed learning about the landmarks when they were white, but enhanced learning when the landmarks were black.