Latent profiles of resilience in chemistry: tracking chemistry performance during critical educational transitions

This study examined changes in senior high school students’ chemistry performance over a semester and how these changes varied based on their academic resilience in chemistry. Participants were 684 first-year senior high school students from 14 schools. Latent profile analysis revealed three distinct profiles: low (19.152%), moderate (64.766%), and high (16.082%) levels of academic resilience in chemistry. Subsequently, a two-way repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to compare changes in chemistry achievement across the three profiles over the transition period. Results indicated that students in the low-resilience profile showed a declining trend in chemistry achievement, those in the high-resilience profile demonstrated improvement, and those in the moderate-resilience profile exhibited relatively stable achievement. These findings highlight resilience as a universal asset in chemistry learning, extending its relevance beyond at-risk groups. By identifying student profiles and their associated achievement trajectories during the transition period within China’s highly selective educational system, this study provides a person-centred framework that can inform differentiated early support in cognitively demanding science subjects and offers a valuable reference point for other selection-oriented systems internationally.