Academic Resilience

According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are required nutrients to foster engagement and intrinsic motivation across life domains. In the higher education context, numerous studies have shown that instructors can foster students’ psychological needs by creating need-supportive contexts that promote better motivation, learning, and engagement for students³. Within much of this research, the focus has been on instructors’ behaviours and their role in supporting students’ needs, treating students as more passive agents, simply receiving need satisfaction. As such, there is limited research under the SDT framework to understand how students can be active agents of self-support when the learning context itself does not promote need satisfaction. There are many possible reasons to explain why learning contexts are sometimes need-thwarting. Instructors are not always able to provide their students with the need-supportive context they need to thrive. In these adverse contexts, it is becoming more apparent that students may have to find their own ways to support their autonomy, competence, and relatedness, above and beyond what the instructor may be doing in the classroom. Research by Sheldon and colleagues, provides a useful framework within SDT to examine how students can develop strategies to become autonomous learners and foster their academic resilience, by pursuing behaviours that replenish their needs