Academic Resilience in International Education Studies: Validity Challenges and Methodological Considerations

This article-based thesis focuses on academic resilience in the context of international studies using international large-scale assessment data. It investigates theoretical, empirical, and methodological aspects of defining and exploring academic resilience across countries. The empirical investigations used confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and latent profile analysis in order to analyze data from student, teacher, and principal questionnaires in the PISA 2015 and TIMSS 2019. The findings highlight the importance of school and classroom characteristics in promoting academic resilience. This thesis emphasizes considering context-specific features when studying academic resilience across countries in international settings. This study makes contributions to the operationalization of academic resilience in international studies and explores methodologies for investigating the impact of protective factors across different countries. The work was carried out at the Centre for Educational Measurement (CEMO), Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo.