Academic resilience in mathematics and science: Gender and subject patterns across 47 education systems in TIMSS 2023

Academic resilience refers to the ability of socioeconomically disadvantaged students to achieve high levels of academic performance despite adversity. This concept highlights students who succeed against the odds and provides insight into how education systems can better support equity and excellence. Drawing on data from TIMSS 2023 across 47 education systems, this study examines resilience in mathematics and science, with particular attention to subject- and gender-specific patterns. Socioeconomically disadvantaged students are identified as those in the bottom quartile of home educational resources distribution within each education system. Within this group, resilience students are identified using two commonly applied criteria: a fixed threshold using the TIMSS High International Benchmarks of 550 points, and a relative threshold identifying students who achieve in the top quartile of the national achievement distribution. The findings show that resilience patterns are partly definition-dependent, and underline the importance of examining resilience separately by subject and gender. Threshold-based indicators should be interpreted as descriptive measures of achievement among disadvantaged students rather than as comprehensive indicators of adaptive capacity or education-system effectiveness.