Resilience effects on student performance and well-being: the role of self-efficacy, self-set goals, and anxiety

Universities prepare students to become contributing members to the workplace and to society. However, with rising tuition costs and other increasing time and resource demands, students face substantial adversity. Students' ability to cope with that adversity influences successful completion of academic coursework and retention in degree programs, ultimately providing a source of potential effective future employees. Previous research has demonstrated numerous direct relationships between dispositional resilience and pivotal outcomes, such as performance, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being. However, research has failed to explore underlying mechanisms through which resilience may affect these outcomes, especially in academic contexts. The purpose of the current study was to use self-regulation theory as a framework for examining the effects of students' resilience on outcomes. Using a sample of undergraduate students from a Midwestern university in the U.S. (N = 141), we proposed and tested a path model addressing self-efficacy, self-set goals, and state anxiety as mechanisms through which resilience influences performance and subjective well-being. Our results provided evidence supporting a structural model involving resilience, such that student resilience (a) has an indirect effect on performance through self-efficacy and self-set goals, (b) has an indirect effect on state anxiety through self-efficacy, and (c) accounts for unique variance in subjective well-being after controlling for state anxiety. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.