First Generation College Students' Resilience for Repeating a Nursing Course

Student summary

Why This Research Matters

First-generation college students (FGCS) are often the first in their families to attend university, and in nursing programs they carry a heavy load of academic and personal responsibilities at once. This dissertation by Gina A. Canny looks at a specific and painful moment in that journey: what happens when an FGCS nursing student fails to meet the passing standard, or "matriculation," requirement for a nursing course, and then has to decide whether to repeat it. The study asks a focused question: how do first-generation nursing students who repeat a failed course draw on resilience, described here as the drive to "push through" adversity, to eventually succeed?

To answer this, the researcher used an interpretative phenomenological approach. Unlike a method that simply describes what happened, interpretative phenomenology tries to understand the deeper meaning participants make of a lived experience. Here, that experience is failing a nursing course as a first-generation student and then choosing to try again. The "push through" framework, drawn from an earlier Canadian grounded theory study of how baccalaureate nursing students "push through" adversity, guided the interpretation: it treats resilience not as a fixed personality trait some students have and others lack, but as a process that unfolds in stages as students face, sit with, and move past an academic setback.

Participants in the study talked about several connected parts of this experience. First, they described what caused their disengagement from the course in the first place — the moment things started to go wrong. Second, they explained why they chose to stay in the nursing program and repeat the course rather than leave, even though repeating meant delay, extra cost, and the emotional weight of having failed once already. Third, they described how they kept their self-control and focus through the repeated attempt, managing the stress of trying again while still carrying the same academic and personal demands that contributed to the first failure. Finally, participants reflected on how the experience changed them: they acknowledged a personal transformation, and many offered advice for other first-generation nursing students who might find themselves in the same position.

The abstract does not give a numeric sample size, exact institution-level details of participant recruitment, or a breakdown of demographic data beyond identifying participants as first-generation nursing students who repeated a failed course. That is an important gap to keep in mind: the findings describe the lived meaning these particular participants made of their experience, not a measurable rate of success or a generalizable statistic about how many FGCS nursing students succeed after repeating a course.

Why does this matter for you as a nursing student or future nurse? Resilience, the dissertation argues, is not just a personal survival skill for getting through a hard semester. It is connected to becoming the kind of practitioner who can handle the unpredictable stress of clinical practice. The author connects the classroom experience of pushing through a failed course to the professional skills nurses need later — thinking clearly under pressure, staying flexible when a plan does not work, and reflecting honestly on mistakes rather than being paralyzed by them. If you are a first-generation student, or you support students who are, this research suggests that failing a course is not necessarily a dead end; how a student is supported through the disengagement, decision to repeat, and self-management stages may shape whether they eventually succeed and how they carry that experience into practice.

As with any single qualitative dissertation, read this as an in-depth account of one group's experience rather than a proven formula. It is a starting point for asking better questions about how nursing programs identify, support, and mentor first-generation students who stumble on the way to matriculation, rather than a checklist guaranteed to produce resilience in every student who repeats a course.

Faculty notes

Educational Relevance

Gina A. Canny's dissertation, First Generation College Students' Resilience for Repeating a Nursing Course, addresses a practical and recurring problem in nursing education: first-generation college students (FGCS) who fail to meet matriculation requirements in a nursing course and must decide whether to repeat it. The study's aim was to explore how these students demonstrate resilience — understood through the "push through" framework — when they choose to repeat a failed nursing course rather than leave the program.

Methodologically, Canny used an interpretative phenomenological approach, a design intended to surface the meaning participants assign to a lived experience rather than merely describing its surface features. This is a defensible choice for a question about how students make sense of failure, persistence, and identity transformation, since the goal is understanding rather than measurement or generalization. The "push through" framework the study draws on originates in a 2015 constructivist grounded theory study of resilience conducted with 38 students in a four-year baccalaureate nursing program in Ontario, Canada (published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing), which characterizes resilience as a dynamic process — moving through phases such as stepping into a challenge, staying the course, and acknowledging the outcome, with a transient disengaging phase when students struggle — rather than a fixed trait. That the framework itself was developed in a Canadian baccalaureate nursing setting gives it direct relevance for Canadian nurse educators, even though the dissertation does not report where its own participants were recruited. Instructors reviewing this dissertation with students should note that this framework is supplementary context for interpreting the dissertation's approach, not a finding the dissertation itself generated.

Within that framework, participants described four connected elements of their experience: the causes of their initial disengagement from the nursing course; their reasons for staying in the program and repeating rather than withdrawing; the strategies they used to maintain self-control through the repeat attempt; and, finally, their acknowledgment of a personal transformation, alongside advice they would offer other FGCS nursing students facing the same situation.

For teaching purposes, this dissertation is well suited to seminar discussion of qualitative design choices: how phenomenological interviewing captures the texture of a single difficult academic transition, what interpretative phenomenology can and cannot claim relative to descriptive phenomenology or grounded theory, and how a theoretical framework borrowed from prior resilience research shapes both the interview protocol and the interpretation of findings. It also opens a conversation about equity in nursing education: FGCS face documented structural disadvantages (less family familiarity with higher education systems, competing work and caregiving obligations), and this dissertation frames course failure and repetition as a site where those disadvantages and student resilience intersect.

Appraisal-wise, the abstract available for this record does not specify sample size, recruitment site, data saturation, or coding procedures, which limits how confidently faculty can assess methodological rigor without the full text. As a dissertation distributed through ProQuest, full-text access is typically restricted to institutional subscribers, and the ERIC record (ED642019) reflects only the abstract and bibliographic metadata reviewed here. Faculty assigning this source should frame it explicitly as a single-institution qualitative study whose transferability, rather than statistical generalizability, is the relevant standard, and should pair it with the broader resilience literature it draws on for students who want to place its themes in a wider empirical context.