Over the last 20 years there has been an increasing focus on students who succeed educationally against the odds (Borman & Overman, 2004; Finn & Rock, 1997; Martin & Marsh, 2006). These studies identify and examine academically resilient students—that is, those who perform well academically despite what their socioeconomic circumstances would predict. This paper uses 2011 eighth-grade data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to explore (1) how prevalent academically resilient students are across education systems and (2) what factors are associated with academic resilience within those systems. Results indicate that, while there are some notable exceptions, education systems with lower percentages of disadvantaged students tended to produce larger percentages of academically resilient students and vice versa, and the largest percentages of academically resilient students tended also to come from the highest performing education systems. Results from logistic regression analyses revealed that, controlling for student gender, parents’ highest education level, how often student speaks language of test at home, and population size of community school is located in, students’ high educational aspirations appeared to be the strongest and most consistent predictor of academic resilience. Other student factors that also had positive relationships with academic resilience in multiple education systems were students’ valuing of mathematics and experiencing less frequent bullying. While not as consistent in predicting academic resilience as the student factors, several school factors were also positively associated with academic resilience in multiple education systems, including teachers’ confidence in students doing well with difficult material in mathematics, schools’ emphasis on academic success, and schools having a lower percentage of economically disadvantaged students. Results from this study have implications for future research and for potentially developing and implementing interventions that target socioeconomically disadvantaged students and support them in improving their academic performance.

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