Failure attribution and academic resilience: The Filipino students\u27 experience

Studies on resilience usually focus on clinical and counseling psychology. Exploring such construct in educational setting is an emerging trend among researchers in educational psychology. The need to identify adverse conditions in the classroom setting determines how students cope with academic adversity. In school, experience of failure can be perceived as detrimental to learning. Academic failure is an event that can happen to most college students. Some who experience failure may quit but there are also students who thrive amidst failure. Their ability to recover from failure is explained by the attributions they have generated for themselves and such ability to bounce back after an adverse academic experience specifically failure is deemed academic resilience. Students‘ conceptualizations on failure attribution and academic resilience were explored in this study. Researches in resilience are traditionally person focus and variable focus. Thus, a mixed method approach, particularly sequential exploratory design was employed to show the confluence of qualitative and quantitative data which was presented in three phases. First phase showed the attributions of college students (n = 111) of failure and their sources of academic resilience. Student experiences show perceived consequences of academic failure as well as identification of protective factors that foster academic resilience. Second phase employed exploratory factor analysis (n = 1221) and revealed the different factors of failure attribution namely: student amotivation, student inattention and teacher incompetence. Meanwhile, factors for academic resilience were perceived teacher efficacy, faith and religiosity, and academic perseverance. Third phase of this 4 study (n = 336) established the relationship between factors of failure attribution and academic resilience. More so, predictors to academic resilience factors were also identified. It can be concluded that students who manifest amotivation has weak capability to exhibit academic resilience. Failure as a risk factor is attributed to internal sources like amotivation and inattention as well as external sources like teacher incompetence. However, faith and religiosity, academic perseverance contributes to academic resilience