A recent study at Leeds Metropolitan University has found that female students with high resilience levels perform academically better than male students.
The university tested around 1,500 students to see if psychological resilience, or the ability to adapt to new challenges, affects academic performance. According to a press release from the university, the more resilience a student has, the better prepared he or she is to cope with stress at the start of college. Although the link between resilience and academic performance seemed initially similar for men and women, further results showed that resilience has a more positive effect on females.
"Although at the end of the inductees' first academic year the outcomes suggested similar academic performance by gender, higher resilience was progressively and incrementally associated with higher grade profiles for females," says Jim McKenna, Leeds professor of physical activity and health and co-leader of the study. "In some males, and contrary to the conventional understanding of resilience, higher resilience was linked with poorer prospective academic performance. This may be explained by gender-specific differences in how resilience is built. Our analysis revealed that twice as many high-resilience females, over high-resilience males, achieved the two highest grade classification outcomes."
As a result of the study, Leeds Met has implemented "targeted interventions" for male students to access counseling services at the school.