The aim of this study is to examine to what extent students’ self-confidence (CONF) and intrinsic motivation (MOT) as well as instructional quality (INQ) and school’s emphasis on academic success (SEAS) can promote academic resilience in Scandinavian and Asian countries. Students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) tend to perform below their more socially advantaged peers (e.g., Mullis et al., 2016). However, substantial proportions of low-SES students succeed in school. This is called “academic resilience” (OECD, 2011) and can be defined as the capacity of students to perform well despite a disadvantaged background (ibid.). Research shows that MOT and CONF can promote academic resilience (ibid.). With few exceptions (Sandoval-Hernández, & Białowolski, 2016), little is known about the role of schooling though. Therefore, we examine additionally INQ and SEAS (Hoy et al., 2006; Nilsen & Gustafsson, 2016). Furthermore, most studies used 15-year-olds or grade 8 students. Since the first school years are crucial, our study examines students in grade 4. No studies about resilience in the Scandinavian countries exist so that we focus these and compare findings with Asian countries. TIMSS 2015 data in mathematics from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore are used. The sample includes 13,848 students from 955 schools. The operationalization of academic resilience varies. Considering the disparities in economic development and academic achievement, we define academic resilience within countries and adopt the OECD approach with a relaxed threshold to avoid small sample sizes. Resilient students are defined as students with few home educational resources (HER index below the median) but high performance (mathematics score above the median). Results from a logistic regression indicate that students are more likely to be resilient in Scandinavia than in South Korea and Singapore. CONF is crucial for resilience in all countries and the strongest predictor. CONF is particularly important in South Korea and Singapore. MOT does not play a major role, neither in Scandinavia nor in Asia. The same applies to INQ, but SEAS significantly increases the odds to be academically resilient. However, effect sizes were low in Finland and Hong Kong. To conclude: In promoting academic resilience, across cultures attention needs to be paid to students’ confidence in their ability to learn mathematics, and targeted policy is advised that draws on the state of research (Ryan & Deci, 2017).

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