Non-Cognitive Skills and Psychological Resilience Training for Students and Faculty: An Adaptive Mindsets Toolkit for The Modern Education Experience

Abstract

Increasingly, research in education is demonstrating the value of non-cognitive factors in student success. In college, students face myriad challenges and struggles on a daily basis (e.g., getting a bad grade, dealing with the stress of increasing academic demands, or having a negative interaction with friends). How they respond to those difficulties can predict their long-term success: do they crumble or do they bounce back and grow from the experience? Research in psychology and education has helped to develop a small arsenal of strategies that can foster greater resilience against the daily challenges of the college experience.

Working with (and taking advantage of) the in-house expertise of researchers at Pitt within the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), this project aims to mine those effective strategies and tools that students and educators can apply to foster more adaptive mindsets and non-cognitive skills into daily practice. In so doing, the purpose of this proposal is to bridge the gap between research and practice by directly connecting Pitt students and educators with the latest, and most effective, insights from the field’s leading experts on mindset and motivation and translating those insights into easily manageable and applicable forms into an online Adaptive Mindsets Toolkit.

Collaborators