Rethinking Resilience: Evaluating an Integrated Academic Resilience Curriculum in Undergraduate STEM Courses

The Rethinking Resilience project includes an interactive Brightspace module designed to teach undergraduate students about stress, coping, and academic resilience. The goal of this module is to empower undergraduate students to identify their own stress responses, understand the effects of stress on the body and brain, and explore evidence-based strategies for enhancing their resilience in the face of moderate, everyday stressors such as those posed by an undergraduate degree. Given the known mental health challenges faced by undergraduate students in STEM (Pester, Noh, & Fu, 2023), it is hoped that this module may provide needed support to students and promote well-being, motivation, and healthy approaches to learning. In this way, it is hoped the module will augment existing STEM curricula and empower students to manage their academic workloads more effectively. We recently launched a pilot of the project with eleven participating classes, collecting pre- and post-module data regarding student stress and mental health, as well as feedback about the module. Continuing our meaningful collaboration, we intend to use this pilot data as a guide to evaluate the module as part of the curriculum in these courses and develop new ideas to further enhance its use, integrate it more intentionally into courses, and clarify expectations and usability for learners.