Even for the brightest, most well-adjusted student, the transition from high school to college is challenging. It's critically important for college and university educators to aide students during this difficult, yet exciting time in their life. Students need a strong support system within the university environment to improve their college experience and achieve successful outcomes.
First-year experience programs have become a best practice in higher education. As institutions endeavor to increase retention, it's necessary to take advantage of resources and information that will better assist instructors in having meaningful discussions with students about pertinent first-year issues. These issues include time management, study habits, self-care, goal-setting, and social adjustment. Social adjustment during the first six weeks of a student’s first year is essential to the student's ability to succeed.
SCoRE® (Student Curriculum on Resilience Education®) was developed to enable colleges and universities to engage students in a research-based program that helps students cope with the personal, social, and academic challenges of college life.
Resilience = The ability to adapt = Success
The curriculum was developed by psychologists in collaboration with ten colleges and universities and is available as either an instructor-led or self-paced, online course. Read more about the program.
For information on purchasing SCoRE for colleges and universities, see the Program Overview.
Instructors report high satisfaction with the quality of the SCoRE curriculum, materials, and website:
"The strength of SCoRE is the breadth of the resilience concept, which provides the opportunity to have meaningful discussions about pertinent first-year issues, including time management, self-care, alcohol, role-modeling, and values clarification. SCoRE provides a platform to seamlessly and thematically address these retention issues in an attractive and accessible way."
Sean McGreevey, PhD
Assistant Dean of Students
Chatham University
"What I think is really terrific about this curriculum is that it covers multiple, different kinds of resilience ... Offering a curriculum that gives young people the opportunity to, in a sense, have a dialogue with themselves about what their potential is and what their vulnerabilities are can be an enormously helpful thing. It has the potential, I think, to really prevent problems that may occur otherwise."
Ellen Frank, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
"We were very impressed with the quality of the SCoRE materials. I really appreciated the instructor manual and website training – they allowed me to train other instructors easily. Overall, we really enjoyed SCoRE and believe it benefited our students."
Randon Willard, MA
Academic, Personal, & Crisis Counselor
Robert Morris University
"SCoRE focuses on important aspects of resilience that our students need to learn. Many SCoRE students identify stress and time-management strategies, self-esteem, and overcoming personal issues as being particularly meaningful topics for them."
Mary Ann Salotti, PhD
Professor
California University of Pennsylvania
"It seems as if we've reached some kind of tipping point where students are less able to cope with daily stressors. There are a lot of reasons behind that, but it manifests itself on college and university campuses in a variety of ways ... It would be amazingly helpful to have students participate in a structured experience such as a course to teach them resiliency skills."
Shawn Brooks, PhD
Dean of Students
University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
