Active learning and clear goals are linked to stronger student resilience

By Student Voice AI

Published Feb 25, 2026 · Updated Feb 25, 2026

At Student Voice AI, we work with universities that want to understand what makes the student experience resilient, not only what makes it fragile. In a recent Higher Education paper, Faming Wang, Peiqi Huang, Yueyang Xi and Ronnel B. King examine how the teaching and learning environment relates to students’ ability to cope and adapt. It is a useful lens for UK teams because it points to levers that sit inside course design and everyday teaching practice, not only inside individual wellbeing services. Read the paper here.

Context and research question

Universities often talk about resilience as a personal characteristic, something students either have or do not have. That framing can push institutions towards interventions that focus on individuals, for example workshops on coping skills, signposting, or one-to-one support for students already in difficulty.

Wang and colleagues argue that this is incomplete. They start from a practical point: resilience develops in context. If students repeatedly experience uncertainty, poorly signposted expectations, or learning environments that feel hard to navigate alone, it becomes harder to “bounce back” from setbacks, even for students with strong personal resources.

Their central question is straightforward and operational: which aspects of the teaching and learning environment are linked to student resilience, and how do students describe the mechanisms behind those links?

Key findings

The study uses an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. The quantitative phase analyses survey data from 1,068 university students using structural equation modelling, then the qualitative phase uses in-depth interviews with 15 students to explain the patterns in more detail.

One of the headline findings is that students who engage in more active learning activities are more likely to be resilient. This matters because active learning is not only a pedagogy discussion, it is also an experience discussion. Active learning can create structured opportunities to practise, get feedback, and build confidence through small cycles of effort and improvement.

The paper also finds that clear goals and standards from teaching staff are linked to stronger resilience. In practice, clarity reduces one of the most common sources of avoidable strain in student feedback: not knowing what “good” looks like, how to prioritise effort, or how performance will be judged. When expectations are clear, setbacks become more interpretable, and students can adjust strategies rather than spiralling into doubt.

"Resilience does not develop within a vacuum and is strongly shaped by the context."

Finally, the interviews help widen the frame beyond “good teaching”. Students describe resilience as something they build through a combination of supportive learning environments, coping strategies, and peer support. The implication is that resilience is partly social and partly structural. It depends on whether students have people and routines they can rely on when pressure rises.

Practical implications

For UK higher education teams, three practical moves follow from these findings.

Treat clarity of goals and standards as a resilience intervention. Use student feedback to audit where expectations are unclear, for example through module evaluation prompts like “What was unclear about what good work looks like?”. Free-text analysis can then identify repeat issues (briefing quality, rubric clarity, exemplars, feedback usefulness) and help teams prioritise fixes.
Design active learning with support, not just participation. If active learning is meant to build resilience, it needs predictable scaffolding: clear task purpose, low-stakes practice opportunities, and feedback students can act on quickly. Student comments often reveal when active learning feels like “busy work” rather than skill-building, which is a strong signal to redesign.
Measure resilience through student voice, not only through outcomes. NSS and end-of-year survey scores can show where experience is weak, but they are often late signals. Short pulse surveys with one open-text prompt, such as “What has made it harder to cope with your studies in the last two weeks?”, can surface the operational causes. Student Voice Analytics can help by categorising and benchmarking the themes behind those comments so that resilience work can be targeted and tracked over time.

FAQ

Q: How can student experience teams use survey comments to spot resilience issues early?

A: Add one short, time-bounded open-text prompt to existing pulse surveys or mid-module evaluations, focused on what has helped or hindered coping in the last two weeks. Analyse comments for repeatable friction points such as unclear expectations, workload clustering, lack of feedback, or isolation from peers. The goal is to turn early signals into practical fixes, then close the loop so students can see change.

Q: Does structural equation modelling prove that active learning and clarity cause resilience?

A: Not on its own. Structural equation modelling estimates relationships between variables, which can support plausible mechanisms but does not fully establish causality. The value here is the combination: the quantitative pattern is paired with qualitative interviews that describe how students experience goals, standards, and learning activities in practice. UK teams should treat these findings as evidence-informed hypotheses, then test them against local data.

Q: What does this mean for how we interpret student wellbeing in NSS and internal surveys?

A: It suggests that “wellbeing” is partly produced by teaching and learning systems. If students’ coping capacity rises when expectations are clear and learning is structured, then survey work should connect wellbeing signals to specific drivers such as assessment clarity, feedback usefulness, and peer support. Free-text is often where those drivers are visible, because it captures the mechanisms behind the score.

References

[Paper Source]: Faming Wang, Peiqi Huang, Yueyang Xi, Ronnel B. King "Fostering resilience among university students: the role of teaching and learning environments" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-025-01484-2

Request a walkthrough

Book a free Student Voice Analytics demo

See all-comment coverage, sector benchmarks, and reporting designed for OfS quality and NSS requirements.

All-comment coverage with HE-tuned taxonomy and sentiment.
Versioned outputs with TEF-ready reporting.
Benchmarks and BI-ready exports for boards and Senate.

Prefer email? info@studentvoice.ai

UK-hosted · No public LLM APIs · Same-day turnaround