Evaluating the online Resilience Skills Enhancement programme among undergraduate students: A double‐blind parallel randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Resilience training has beneficial effects on the ability of undergraduate students to withstand adversity and stress. However, there are inconsistencies in the content and delivery approaches for resilience training. Given the increasing shifts towards computer‐assisted instruction, there is a need to develop and evaluate innovative approaches for resilience training. This study aimed to examine the efficacy of two versions of the Resilience Skills Enhancement (RISE) programme. A randomized controlled trial was used to evaluate the effects of blended learning (BL) and a self‐guided RISE programme on the resilience, social support, and learning outcomes of undergraduate students. One hundred and fourteen students were recruited and randomly allocated to receive either BL or the self‐guided RISE programme. The within‐group analyses indicated significant improvements in resilience scores for the BL (F = 37.74, p < 0.001) and self‐guided groups (F = 10.16, p < 0.001) with moderate (d = 0.62, 95% CI: 0.25, 1.00) to large effect sizes (d = 1.11, 95% CI: 0.71, 1.50) respectively. There were also significant differences across the three time points for social support scores for the BL (F = 4.50, p < 0.05) and self‐guided groups (F = 4.59, p < 0.05). Students in the BL group had considerable improvements in self‐efficacy of learning and performance (F = 5.42, p < 0.01) and meta‐cognitive self‐regulation scores (F = 5.91, p < 0.01). In the between‐group analyses, both BL and self‐guided RISE were comparable for resilience, social support, and learning scores (p > 0.05). The study provided preliminary evidence that both modes, BL and self‐guided RISE programme lead to positive effects on the resilience, social support, and learning scores of students.

The Impact of Resilience Interventions on University Students’ Mental Health and Well-Being: A Systematic Review

“…Overall, this review suggests that there may be some benefits to such interventions for stress and anxiety but they are not necessarily accompanied by changes in measures of resilience or mindfulness, which may indicate different underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, this review demonstrates that more high-quality studies are required, as has been previously noted in reviews in this area [32][33][34]108]. This is particularly noticeable for skills-based interventions.…”

“…We could not determine the inclusion or exclusion criteria the researchers used to recruit participants in a large proportion of the studies (n = 31) [45,[47][48][49][50]52,53,55,56,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][69][70][71]75,77,78,81,82,84,85,87,88]. Lastly, 42 studies did not state, and for some studies, we could not determine, whether the experimenters reviewing the outcome variables were blinded to the participants' exposure, meaning only 5 studies did this [57,74,79,90,91,108].…”