Chapter 14: Future Directions for Educational Resiliency Research

Our nation faces very serious challenges in serving students at risk of academic failure. Progress has been made in isolated areas, but to sustain this progress and to extend it to much larger numbers of schools, a more solid research base must be provided for the many suspected connections between instructional processes and student outcomes, and for the level of effectiveness of various promising programs in diverse contexts (Rossi & Stringfield, 1995). More studies are needed to examine how some students overcome adversity and become successful in our schools. These students, often called resilient learners, often face enormous hardships in their lives but nevertheless succeed. Although threatened by a variety of risks, they overcome apparently insurmountable odds to build promising futures (Masten, 1994). Through the study of resilience, educators can identify factors that have been found to be effective in providing support for students at risk of failure and then apply them to similar students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have not done well in school (Padrón, Waxman, & Huang, 1999; Waxman, Huang, & Padrón, 1997).