Resilience theory and research in engineering education: what good can it do?

Resilience is an important life skill that most students need to overcome setbacks caused by academically adverse factors. However, engineering educators mostly only focus on supporting students to develop cognitive or technical skills. This article introduces academic resilience as a theoretical framework to investigate how students respond to academic challenges in engineering, and the relevance of the framework to research in engineering education. In this article, we discussed basic tenets of educational resilience research and suggest ways in which resilience research could advance existing areas of research within engineering education. Lastly, we provided an example to illustrate how a focus on resilience framework informed the way we conceptualised an exploratory research study.