Feasibility and Preliminary Outcomes of a Contemplation based Flourishing Course in a Minority Serving State University

Emerging adulthood is a developmental stage that is underscored by elevated mental-health risk alongside heightened developmental plasticity, motivating proactive, curricular approaches to promote student well-being. The Art and Science of Human flourishing (ASHF) course, designed for undergraduate students, targets proximal skills such as attention/mindfulness, compassion/common humanity, self-compassion, and social and emotional learning skills, with downstream psychological and physiological outcomes. Multi-site evaluations of the ASHF course have reported beneficial pre–post changes in addition to student satisfaction with the course. Yet the ASHF course curriculum has not been examined for feasibility and outcomes within a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI). The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate the feasibility and preliminary outcomes of the ASHF course curriculum in a diverse, commuter, MSI—the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) — using a culturally grounded lens. As a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–Serving Institution (AANAPISI) UIC will be the first such institution to test the feasibility of the ASHF course curriculum. Participants will include approximately 30-35 undergraduate students enrolled in a 200-level psychology course at UIC titled Resilience: Psychology of Positive Adaptation during the spring 2026 semester, in which the ASHF course curriculum will be implemented. A one-arm, convergent-parallel mixed-methods design with embedded weekly reflections will be implemented within a bounded case study. Feasibility—acceptability, demand, practicality, adaptation, and expansion—will be assessed via qualitative questions. Qualitative sources will include open-ended items in pre- and post-course surveys, weekly reflections, post-course satisfaction surveys, and stratified interviews. Quantitative data will be collected in the pre- and post-course surveys using reliable, valid measures of flourishing and related constructs including interoceptive awareness, self-construal, self-compassion, and spiritual-transcendence. Results will be integrated via joint displays to examine convergence and divergence between student narratives and changes on outcome measures. Preliminary outcomes will be interpreted with estimation-focused statistics and effect sizes appropriate to feasibility work. Attention to cultural context (e.g., commuter and first-generation status; family/community norms; independent–interdependent orientations) will inform implementation and interpretation. Anticipated contributions include an empirically grounded feasibility profile for the ASHF course in UIC’s cultural context and its preliminary impact on student outcomes. Standardized, replicable procedures and codebooks, along with design parameters, will inform subsequent research and advance culturally responsive contemplative education at UIC and other MSIs.