Developing resilience skills in Higher Education students through curriculum embedded workshops

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of a resilience building intervention that was designed and delivered in a final year undergraduate module in the Ulster University Business School during a period of lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic. The researcher argues for a processes perspective, claiming that personal resilience is a dynamic process that can be developed in individuals over their life experiences and nurtured and learnt within an educational setting. The intervention design adopted a constructive curriculum alignment approach involving the setting of pre-determined learning outcomes that enabled the researcher to explore and measure student knowledge (knowing), skills (doing) and behaviours (being) related to key intrapsychic or internal resilience promoting factors (active coping skills, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-control, self-management, optimism and self-care).

A mixed methods research methodology comprising surveys and focus group research was utilized. Students were surveyed before (n=216) and after the intervention (n=164) to measure the learning gain with respect to the intrapsychic resilience promoting factors and to obtain feedback on the intervention content and design. Post-intervention, two student focus groups (n=12) were conducted to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of the intervention in terms of enhancing student capacity to build personal resilience.

The survey findings showed promise as students who attended the intervention self-reported significant improvements in their levels of knowledge of the construct of resilience, enhancement in their abilities to harness the skills to develop their personal resilience, and changes in attitudes to appreciate the value and importance of developing their own personal resilience. The focus group findings supported this development of student knowledge, skills and attitudes, and the study overall proports that, through embracing a combined psychoeducational, mindfulness and cognitive behavioural design, such interventions can be effective in building overall student resilience.

Date of Award	Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Laura Dunne (Supervisor)