Initial Publication Date: July 15, 2022

Building Resilience

This exercise is intended to help students reflect on how they can overcome obstacles. It asks them to think back to a prior experience and draw out lessons that might help them succeed in their research projects. This exercise can be used anytime or paired with Building Research Resilience.

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Background

The goal of this exercise is to help you learn how to learn about your own learning and how to make adjustments to learn more effectively. This process, called 'metacognition,' has been shown to improve student success in all sorts of ways, including boosts in reading comprehension, exam performance, and problem-solving. This exercise gives you an opportunity to learn about your own learning and apply those lessons to your research project.

Purpose of the exercise

This exercise is intended to help you reflect on how you can overcome obstacles in conducting research. Metacognitive students are effective learners because they are flexible in their thinking and willing to make adjustments. This exercise asks you to think about and build upon prior successes.

Instructions

Consider an activity that you have invested time into (such as, playing sports, making music, playing video games, making art). Think about a time when you encountered difficulty and successfully rose to the challenge. Answer the following questions. Your answers do not need to be overly long, but you should try to provide enough detail so that you explain your responses.

 

  1. Name the activity and describe the nature of the obstacle you encountered while engaged in this activity.
  2. Describe how the difficulty appeared. For example, did it appear all at once or develop over time?
  3. How did you respond to the obstacle?
  4. How did you know how to respond to the obstacle?
  5. Did your strategy work the first time or did you need to try different strategies? 
  6. Looking and reflecting back on this, was there anything you could have done differently to have avoided the difficulty?
  7. What are the positive lessons from the experience that might help you when you face challenges in your research project?