Academic Buoyancy: First-Year A-Level Students’ and Tutors’ Experiences and Perceptions

Abstract

An extensive body of literature considers the concept of academic achievement/ underachievement, high-stakes testing, and a variety of subject-domain-specific research into GCE A-Level qualifications. Less prominent in the literature is a focus on studying A-Levels from the viewpoint of A-Level students themselves, their ‘everyday’ experiences of studying the qualifications, the influences that shape their perspectives of achievement and success during A-Level study, or the factors that they perceive to affect or improve it. This focus on the ‘everyday’ ups and downs that form an inevitable part of academic life and how students successfully handle them is also a growing area of research, termed academic buoyancy (Martin & Marsh, 2009), and identified as a concept that is related to, but distinct from, other areas of research including academic achievement, ‘high-stakes’ qualifications, academic self-concept, character education, and resilience.
This thesis presents an exploratory study into the concept of academic buoyancy in an A-Level context, focusing in particular on the perspectives and experiences of students who have transitioned from school and GCSE into their first year of A-Level studies at an FE college, along with the perspectives and experiences of A-Level tutors who teach or have taught first-year A-Level students.
This explorative qualitative study, heavily influenced by phenomenology, takes an inductive approach with the assistance of 10 first-year A-Level students and 8 A-Level tutors involved in 4 focus groups. The data has been analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, underpinned by aspects of narrative analysis, with emergent themes exploring participant perspectives and attempting to capture the authentic voice of the participants.
The main findings to emerge from the data was a sense of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ factors shaping participants’ academic buoyancy: societal and external expectations and perceptions; the high stakes A-Level environment and the first year as a time of transition; participants’ own actions, expectations and perceptions; and the dialogue/interactions they have with themselves and others.
Whilst these factors possessed distinct components, how participants communicated their experiences presented these components as intrinsically and inextricably linked.
Their experiences tended to be conveyed in an ‘overarching’ narrative - conceptualised in this research as a ‘quest’ (Booker, 2004), in which A-Level students’ academic buoyancy is simultaneously both a quantitative, publicly high-profile experience, and also a less tangible, intensely individual, emotional and reflective developmental journey.