History & Research
The RBP has been implemented at Alvord Baker with children from kindergarten to highs school, with groups focused on various developmental needs including specialized groups for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. To learn more about resilience builder groups at Alvord Baker, click here.
In 2009, Alvord Baker began a research collaboration with The Catholic University of America, examining the RBP’s effectiveness in both private practice and school contexts. Over more than a decade, studies have demonstrated that youth who participate in the RBP show improvements in resilience, social competence, and emotional regulation (Aduen et al., 2014; Alvord, Rich, & Berghorst, 2014; Senior et al., 2020; Watson et al., 2013).
Further research examined the efficacy of the RBP in economically marginalized communities. The RBP increases students’ resilience skills, study skills, academic engagement, interpersonal skills, and academic motivation in students from economically marginalized communities, and that increases in resilience and other core social skills were comparable between participants in the private practice setting compared to students from economically marginalized schools (Rich et al., 2019; Donoue et al., 2025). ​
The RBP-U
The RBP was adapted into a teacher-led universal program for 4th- and 5th-grade students, the Resilience Builder Program-Universal (RBP-U). The RBP-U was developed to serve as a universal intervention for youth to develop social and emotional skills. The program focuses on strengthening resilience by teaching skills such as helpful thinking, coping with stress and anxiety, and effective problem solving. RBP-U utilizes an online platform, providing access to 25 fifteen-minute lessons with step-by-step scripts to guide teachers through each lesson. More information about the RBP-U can be found here.
Current Efforts
​Starting in 2024, the RBP-U has been delivered to students in Prince George’s County Community Schools. The pilot intervention was shown to increase student and teacher-reported resilience along with teacher-reported academic enablers including interpersonal skills, academic motivation and academic engagement. During the 2025-2026 school year, a randomized controlled trial was conducted to further establish the efficacy of the RBP-U in 4th and 5th grade students.
RBP-U Outcomes
In the 2024–2025 school year, a pilot study with 194 4th- and 5th-grade students in Prince George’s County demonstrated significant improvements in resilience, academic motivation, engagement, and interpersonal skills. Students showed increases on the Resilience Scale (reported by both students and teachers), and teachers reported gains on the ACES.
Note: In the accompanying graph, an *asterisk indicates statistically significant differences* from pre- to post-intervention.
Current Efforts – Randomized Controlled Trial
The Resilience Builder Program-Universal™ (RBP-U) is currently being evaluated in a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) during the 2025–2026 school year in Prince George’s County. This trial is testing the program’s effectiveness when delivered classroom-wide and is designed to provide rigorous evidence of its impact on resilience, social-emotional skills, and academic engagement.