Academic Resilience and Education Governance in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract

Academic resilience has taken on renewed significance in the aftermath of the pandemic — a generational event that disrupted the education of more than 1.5 billion students across the globe. Unsurprisingly, cross-national research has adequately documented the profound impact of school closures on traditional cognitive domains such as reading, mathematics, and science achievement. At the same time, COVID-19 has also brought into sharper focus the important role schools play in supporting skills such as academic resilience, among others, that are commonly classified as “non-cognitive” skills, as well as their role in enhancing academic success. Yet academic resilience is often viewed as a narrow construct. Louis Volante and Don A. Klinger analyze how academic resilience has traditionally been conceptualized, along with the nature and scope of policy interventions to support students in the aftermath of the pandemic.