How can we help students manage frustration and build resilience?

Academic life presents numerous challenges, and one of the most significant of those is exams. An essential part of any student’s journey, assessments can cause anxiety and become even harder to cope with when results don’t meet expectations, leading to feelings of frustration, discouragement and even despair.

Learning to manage these feelings is a fundamental part of a student’s journey. It is crucial to help them navigate these emotions and the opportunities for personal growth they offer. The ability to handle frustration will not only be useful during their time at university but also throughout their adult lives.

An effective way to support students who have received poor marks is to present academic failure as a natural and necessary part of the educational process. The focus, then, shifts because an exam is no longer just a test that helps students pass a course and demonstrate acquired knowledge, but also an opportunity to strengthen the student’s character and help them develop their resilience and self-confidence. Here are some ways you can offer support.

Encourage self-reflection 

Often, students lack the information and vocabulary needed to identify what they are feeling. Recognising and accepting emotions is key, and we must encourage them to do this via discussion before progressing with coping strategies. Encouraging self-reflection and self-awareness is one way of doing this. Prompt students to ask themselves questions such as:

• Did I study as effectively as possible?
• How much did I understand the material before the exam?
• Did I dedicate enough time to studying?
• Did I ask for help when I needed it?

Answering these questions and understanding the emotions they bring up can be the first step towards developing a more effective study strategy.

Promote a growth mindset 

Many students believe their intelligence level is fixed and unchangeable, according to a March 2024 report by Argentinos por la Educación. This narrow view limits the potential for personal development.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, is based on the belief that we can develop intelligence and skills over time through education and perseverance. Helping students shift to this perspective is, therefore, essential. We must teach them to focus on learning as a continuous process, rather than as a means to an end, as this can increase their motivation and resilience.

One way to teach a growth mindset is to encourage goal planning in the lead-up to exams. This way, students can take control of their learning and develop healthy habits. It will also allow students to celebrate small achievements and understand that small steps can lead to impactful learning.

Teaching and using a growth mindset vocabulary can also be a great help. This includes harnessing the power of “yet”. So instead of students saying: “I don’t understand this”, they say: “I don’t understand this yet.” Encourage students to pay special attention to their own internal dialogue when facing challenges.

At Universidad Austral, we’ve also organised peer tutoring spaces for particularly difficult subjects during which students who passed the class previously have acted as tutors for groups of beginner-level students. The main success of this activity was the rapid shift in the perception and mindset of beginner students, from “this is impossible” to “I am speaking to someone that has passed this course and is just like me”.

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Teach planning skills 

Once students have reflected on their poor results and processed their experiences, they must learn how to plan for the future by reviewing what additional resources they can incorporate into their exam prep to achieve better results. Teaching them to use an agenda and plan their time effectively is fundamental to approaching future assessments with greater confidence.

Proposing a plan with concrete actions can help reduce anxiety and improve students’ ability to prepare for upcoming challenges. At Universidad Austral, to help students learn to plan their time effectively, we teach them how long it takes for them to read one page or 800 words. To do this, we ask them to bring enjoyable reading material and to take as much time as they need while we time them. The knowledge of their “fun reading mode” time gives beginner students an idea of how much time they need to assign to reading in their agendas.

Learning to manage frustration, build resilience and foster a growth mindset are skills that students will value in the long run, not just during exams. A course that integrates technical knowledge with personal development will prepare future professionals for success and contribute to their long-term well-being.

Agustina Ortelli is a coach and coordinator of the student well-being programme at Universidad Austral.

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