Resilience-Based School Intervention: Improved Classroom Engagement and Associated Academic Benefits

Abstract

Academic engagement (i.e., constructive, enthusiastic, emotionally positive, and focused participation in school) is associated with the ability to adaptively cope with academic setbacks, challenges, and failures. Due to marginalization, adverse life events, and lack of resources being more common among ethnoracial minoritized youth and those from economically marginalized communities, these children are also more likely to live and learn in a context that presents barriers to their academic engagement. Given that academic engagement is associated with academic achievement, social support, and positive self-regard, it is critical to identify interventions that foster academic engagement. Prior research finds that the Resilience Builder Program^® (RBP), a group intervention implemented in schools with youth with psychosocial difficulties, increased students’ classroom engagement and academic motivation. The current study expanded on previous findings to determine if this improved academic engagement was associated with improvement in other related domains. Using a sample comprised predominately of ethnoracial minoritized and economically marginalized youth (N = 47), results found that these students had lower baseline engagement scores than the population mean, but this disparity disappeared after the RBP intervention. Additionally, the increase in engagement was significantly related to improvements in academic ability, adaptability, attention, and resilience. These results speak to the value of resilience skills and academic engagement in promoting a number of important academic and socioemotional skills in marginalized youth.