International Coaching Psychology Review, 4.2, September 2009

John Franklin & Justin Doran
uals to respond adaptively to change and the
capacity to bounce back from hardship, loss,
illness and adversity (Tugade & Fredrickson,
2004). Resilience has been linked to many
indicators of positive functioning (Beasley,
Thompson & Davidson, 2003; Carver, 1998;
King et al., 1998) and thus may be expected
to both facilitate adaptive functioning and
hopefully itself be a by product of effective
coaching. The concepts of resilience, hope,
an implicit growth mindset, and self-compassion
were assessed in the present study to
determine the effect of coaching on these
internal processes, and to determine their
relationship to the externally assessed objective
gold standard of academic performance.
The current study
The transition to university has long been
recognised as stressful with research confirming
negative effects on health, interpersonal
relations, academic performance and
retention (Burns, 1991; Robbins et al.,
2004). Numerous theories have been proposed
to account for these difficulties and a
variety of interventions have been developed
to assist with the transition, the most
common of which focus on the teaching of
study skills (Gettinger & Seibert, 2002) and
coping skills (Steinhardt & Dolbier, 2008).
Two meta-analyses of the effects of psychosocial
and study skills on student learning and
academic performance have recently been
conducted which both review the theory and
research over the last three decades (Hattie,
Biggs & Purdie, 1996; Robbins et al., 2004).
Drawing on these results, a comprehensive
study and coping skills co-coaching programme
was constructed which was set
within either a conventional self-regulation
framework, or the PAAL motivational and
adaptive learning framework outlined above,
and delivered to a cohort of first-year university
students. The advantage of evaluating
coaching in this context is that universities
have a very well developed and finely graduated
method of independently assessing performance.
Such objective fine grained
independent evaluation is very difficult to
achieve in other settings. The hypotheses
evaluated were that: 1. Both the Self-regulation
and the PAAL coaching programmes
would produce significant improvements in
academic self-efficacy, decisional balance,
hope and resilience, but that the PAAL programme
would produce significantly greater
changes. 2. Only the PAAL programme
would produce significant changes in a
growth mindset and in self-compassion.
3. That both coaching conditions would produce
significant increases in the externally
assessed academic performance, but the
PAAL condition would produce significantly
greater changes in academic performance.
Method
Participants
Participants were 52 first-year university
students (21 male and 31 female) from a
metropolitan university in Sydney, Australia.
Participants were recruited on a voluntarily
basis though lecture announcements and
pamphlets to participate in a free cocoaching
programme titled ‘Successology
101’. The participants were aged between 17
and 56 years (M=24.44, SD=8.90). Seventyone
per cent of the participants reported
English as their first language.
Measures
Academic performance
The average mark was chosen as the measure
of academic performance as it offered
results on a 0 to 100 scale as opposed to
reliance on less sensitive grade point averages
(GPA). Each participant’s academic
performance was measured by calculating
the sum of their total grades for each subject,
and then dividing this total by the number of
subjects they completed, to produce an
average mark.
Self-Efficacy Scale (SES)
The four-item SES was developed as a
measure of self-efficacy in relation to academic
tasks. The four items referred to
improving grade point average, passing
exams, completing homework assignments
132 International Coaching Psychology Review ● Vol. 4 No. 2 September 2009