Bridging the Gap

The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”, becoming a response to both the causes and effects of ongoing global challenges. As it strongly stresses cities’ transformative potential, resilience’s final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events and improve communities’ environmental and social quality. Although the resilience theory has been investigated in depth, several methodological challenges remain, mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty of meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. This will arguably be one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience. The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading, and it seeks to synthesise state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. The Special Issue collected 11 papers that address the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? What are the existing methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to have? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?

Resilience and protective factors in a Midwestern community : a participatory action approach

Resilience is a systemic process between a person and his/her environment (Ungar, 2005), whereby a person demonstrates a pattern of “good outcome despite serious threats to adaptation or development” (Masten, 2001, p. 28). Despite much research, the resilience research field lacks consensus on specific definitions of resilience factors (Ungar et al., 2005). Therefore, it is recommended that research prioritize specific resilience variables (Luthar & Zelazo, 2003) while attending to contextual and systemic factors (Ungar, 2005). The study took place in a community center in a low SES, predominantly African-American neighborhood in the Midwest. Neighborhood residents worked with research team members to co-construct a local definition of youth resilience through focus groups. Children meeting this definition were nominated by staff and participated in interviews about resilience factors. Children, parents, and staff also completed rating scales measuring resilient youth’s academic, behavioral, social, and emotional functioning. Qualitative examinations of data resulted in an ecosystemic model of resilient youth in the community. Resilience was found to be influenced by interactions between individual, familial, and community factors. Individual perseverance and adult involvement and awareness, as well as community cohesion were important protective factors identified by participants. Results of the study were shared with community center staff with plans to utilize them at the center to help promote positive youth functioning.Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance ServicesThesis (Ph. D.

Measuring mathematical resilience : an application of the construct of resilience to the study of mathematics

To meet the challenge of accelerating demands for quantitative literacy in the work force, improvements are needed in mathematics education. Student skill must be increased at all ability levels while also reducing the achievement gap across gender, racial and ethnic groups to increase their participation in advanced mathematics coursework and representation in mathematics related careers (National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008). Research has shown that affective traits such as motivation and attitude are linked to increased likelihood of taking advanced mathematics courses (Ma, 2006) and are significant predictors of improved cognitive activity and achievement (Buff, Reusser, Rakoczy,& Pauli, 2011; Ethington & Wolfe, 1986). In addition, males generally score more favorably than females on affective variables related to mathematics achievement and persistence (McGraw, Lubienski, & Strutchens, 2006; Sherman & Fennema, 1977; Wilkins and Ma, 2003). Although psychological resilience has been researched extensively (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Luthar, 2007) the study of mathematical resilience, defined as a positive adaptive stance to mathematics which allows students to continue learning despite adversity, represents a new approach (Johnston-Wilder & Lee, 2010; Rivera & Waxman, 2011). Math anxiety looks at maladaptive response to learning mathematics and is well-studied (Hembree, 1990; Richardson & Suinn, 1977; Tobias, 1978). In contrast, resilience incorporates factors associated with optimal functioning. Although mathematical resilience has been identified as important for success (Johnston-Wilder & Lee, 2010; Rivera & Waxman, 2011), little consensus exists around its definition and no measures of resilience have been rigorously developed and/or validated. Rivera & Waxman (2011) identified the use of teacher nomination of resilient students as a limitation of their study, further motivating development of an instrument. This presentation will report on efforts to develop and validate an instrument measuring mathematical resilience. Ultimately, the measure will aid in developing and testing models that gauge the role of mathematical resilience in student achievement and persistence in advanced coursework. These models can be used to develop interventions to improve mathematical resilience, achievement, and quantitative literacy (Johnston-Wilder & Lee, 2010)

Estimation of Resilience in University Students

The objective of the work is to estimate the resilience level of university students for future resilience interventions. The paper presents a conceptual analysis of the term resilience, based on the criteria of contemporary authors framed in two generations. The methods and techniques used in the work are exposed, where two tools for measuring resilience are highlighted. The importance of the study of resilience in the university environment is discussed and the statistical and graphical results related to the application of the aforementioned instruments are shown in terms of measuring the resilience level in the university students of seven faculties of the Technical University of Manabí

Assessing and Measuring Resilience

AbstractConcepts of resilience take two broad forms: (1) hard resilience: the direct strength of structures or institutions when placed under pressure, such as increasing the resilience of a structure through specific strengthening measures to reduce their probability of collapse. (b) soft resilience: the ability of systems to absorb and recover from the impact of disruptive events without fundamental changes in function or structure, which depend on the flexibility and adaptive capacity of the system as a whole, rather than simply strengthening structures or institutions in relation to specific stresses, as in the hard resilience approach. However, there are three possibilities in response to threats of disturbance: (a) Resistance and maintenance, which is characterized by resistance to change. A human system of this type would do its utmost to avoid change and would typically deny that a problem exists. (b) Change at the margins, characterized by acknowledgement of the problem, discussion of the implications, and, hopefully, a clear acknowledgement that the present system is not sustainable and that change is needed. (c) Openness and adaptability, an approach reduces vulnerability by having a high degree of flexibility. Its key characteristic is a preparedness to adopt new basic operating assumptions and institutional structures. Once the resilience options have been identified to meet the vulnerability of a system, it is necessary to compare the degree of resilience that the different alternatives may offer. The different concepts are examined to propose both a qualitative and a possible quantification of the degree of resilience that may be achieved by the different measures proposed for implementation

Algorithm Diversity for Resilient Systems

Diversity can significantly increase the resilience of systems, by reducing the prevalence of shared vulnerabilities and making vulnerabilities harder to exploit. Work on software diversity for security typically creates variants of a program using low-level code transformations. This paper is the first to study algorithm diversity for resilience. We first describe how a method based on high-level invariants and systematic incrementalization can be used to create algorithm variants. Executing multiple variants in parallel and comparing their outputs provides greater resilience than executing one variant. To prevent different parallel schedules from causing variants' behaviors to diverge, we present a synchronized execution algorithm for DistAlgo, an extension of Python for high-level, precise, executable specifications of distributed algorithms. We propose static and dynamic metrics for measuring diversity. An experimental evaluation of algorithm diversity combined with implementation-level diversity for several sequential algorithms and distributed algorithms shows the benefits of algorithm diversity

Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience

The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”. It was applied in planning at the end of the last century as a concept that encourages policies to face stress factors and react by renewing and innovating cities. Resilience becomes instrumental in addressing both causes and effects of significant global challenges. As it motivates the transformative potentials of cities, resilience is commonly named “co-evolutionary resilience” or, most recently, “transformative resilience”. Following this more profound meaning, resilience is not only the opposite of vulnerability but also a “broad concept”, whose final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events together with the improvement of the environmental and social quality of a territorial system. In a nutshell, this approach characterises resilience as a territorial systems’ capacity to respond systemically and dynamically to the present and future shocks related to significant global challenges through non-linear transformation processes. Such processes involve the natural and anthropic characteristics of a territorial system, their performance, quality, and functions. Although the theoretical debate on resilience is deeply investigated, several methodological challenges remain mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. We need to measure resilience because its assessment allows consideration of what resilience is practical and what it is possible, and at which point resilience is realistically likely to fail. This will be arguably one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience. The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?