Stories of how Students use Resources and Strategies to Overcome their Academic Struggles

Paradigmatically, challenges faced by undergraduate engineering students include high workload and a culture of high stress. These and other adversities can eventually result in attrition, poor grade attainment or lack of enjoyment of their course. Significant adversities are also disproportionately faced by engineering students with minoritised cultural or educational backgrounds and characteristics. Prior literature has established general understandings of the effects of academic challenges on students but there are still few cases that describe how challenges are experienced by individual students.

To better understand how students face academic challenges, I have undertaken a longitudinal, narrative interview study in the 2024-25 academic year as part of my PhD. My research focuses on “the process of a student facing and overcoming adversities that affect their ability to study”, which can be referred to as academic resilience. From these interviews I have created themes to describe each students’ responses using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Following this, stories about each students’ own experiences were constructed using the themes as a framework.

My presentation will introduce these stories as case studies to STEM educators. The aim of this is to improve educators’ understanding of how some students might use different resources to overcome challenges, facilitate discussion about narrative research, and gather vital feedback on the stories’ quality and usefulness. Eventually, these stories will be used with engineering educators to identify systemic challenges which can be mitigated or removed to improve students’ ability to study, increasing the likelihood that individuals will enjoy and succeed on their course.