The role of science attitudes, parental support, and teacher support in fostering students’ resilience

Academic resilience is one of the keys to helping students with disadvantages to face frustrations and become excellent. Parents and teachers play an important role in educating students and contributing to their academic resilience. The aim of this study was to use TIMSS-2019 data to investigate whether science attitude, parental support, and teacher support foster resilience, and whether the effects differ across countries. A total of 6,176 lower socioeconomic status eighth-grade students and 760 school principals were sampled from Taiwan, Australia, and the United States, and the data were analysed. Structural equation modelling was conducted to explore the relations between personal factors, contextual factors, and science achievement. Further cross-national comparisons were made via multiple group analyses. The findings suggested that science attitudes had a positive effect on science achievement, and this effect was consistent for the three countries. Specifically, parental support had a positive effect on science achievement in Taiwan. In contrast, this effect was not significant in Australia or the United States. Through this study, we were able to uncover the factors that foster students’ resilience in these three countries and provide insight for those parents, educators, and policymakers who would like to enhance students’ resilience.