The Teacher Academic Buoyancy Scale: Is it possible to keep TABS on students' academic buoyancy?

Abstract

Academic buoyancy (AB) is the ability to overcome minoracademic setbacks. However, although it seems as though teachers wouldbe well placed to comment on this characteristic in students, no teacherreport measure of AB exists. This study evaluates a teacher-report versionof the widely used, student-report, Academic Buoyancy Scale (ABS).Confirmatory factor analysis supported the unifactorial nature of theTeacher Academic Buoyancy Scale (TABS), and the scale showed excellentinternal reliability. However, while there was some evidence for thecriterion-related validity of the TABS, it showed very poor convergentvalidity with the ABS. It also correlated better with academic achievementthan should theoretically be the case for a measure of AB. Further, ABestimates from the two measures were moderated by demographiccharacteristics: teachers rated girls and those not facing adversity as morebuoyant, but the opposite was the case for self-reports. In sum, this studysuggests a significant disjunction between teacher- and self-reports of AB,and that teacher estimates of AB are likely to be affected by salient, nonAB-related, student characteristics.