Phase I of the project took place last academic year where we started to shape the project and gather interested campuses and faculty. Our cohort solidified over the summer where faculty attended workshops and webinars to integrate the resilience survey into their classes. IRBs were written and approved (I made that sound easy didn’t I? lol!) as we prepared to get started!
Phase II was the actual launch of the survey. It began at York with our summer PaSSS students followed by our prep PSU 008 course the week before classes began. We’ve now officially begun the fall semester and these first two weeks of classes saw a flurry of surveys being deployed across the participating campuses (Altoona, Fayette, Harrisburg, Lehigh Valley, Mont Alto and York). A bitly link helped us track the progress each day towards our goal of 500 complete surveys.
Now we move onto Phase III, where we actually start to work with students after their results come back. We’ll be using some resources shared by Dr. Flanagan at our May workshop, and I’ve created a website that students will receive with their emailed results with more strategies, background information and resources on the topic. Some campuses are working with students in-class and others are also doing lunchtime sessions to present strategies and general information. At York, we are doing both of these things as well as a session through our library’s ConnectEd Program.
This is where it will really get interesting!! I’m eager to see how many students we can assist in this process because that’s the bottom line: helping students to not only survive college, but also to thrive while doing so.
Phase IV is the actual analysis of the data. This is being done by Dr. Leo Flanagan at the Center for Resilience Advisory and by individual faculty members completing Scholarship of Teaching & Learning projects in their classes. Desired outcomes of the project are to develop:
- a predictive model of student resilience at the campuses which would allow for more targeted and timely interventions
- benchmark resilience data to be reported to the participating campuses to support retention processes
- a deeper understanding of the role of resilience as it impacts student success at the classroom level through action research and Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) projects
Stay tuned for updates as we progress through this project!
