Student Mental Wellbeing Interventions with a Second-Year Engineering Cohort

Abstract

Concern about student mental wellbeing in university students is high, and first-and second-year students in particular have shown higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress. Evidence indicates that there is a value in context specific mental health literacy interventions embedded into regular academic classes, and that coping strategies help students to not only deal with stress but also to improve cognitive motivation and academic achievement. Within our second-year mechanical engineering academic program, we implemented an embedded series of interventions with the goal of helping students develop and use coping strategies in the face of stress. We found that students could describe their own stress response and coping strategies, and over 80% expected content on stress response and coping strategies would be useful in their own lives. About half of students viewed the interventions as beneficial to them. A third of students expected the activities would positively impact their academics, while another third felt they would have no impact. Test anxiety increased over the year, which we felt was a reasonable result given the rigour of the program. Since we did not have a control group, we could not determine whether our intervention led to lower levels of test anxiety than would have otherwise occurred. Our results suggest that academic buoyancy (day-to-day resilience in an academic program) is a critical skill - low academic buoyancy was a significant predictor of increased test anxiety, while low self-efficacy was not. This finding, along with students responses indicating the usefulness of the interventions, support our approach of introducing coping skills into an academic engineering program.

It’s Time to Bring Mental Health Literacy Education into the Postsecondary Curriculum

“…Recent developments have explicitly prioritized MHL education for students for the first time (MHCC, 2020), signaling the start of a movement towards mental health literate postsecondary communities. This is exemplified by the current shift towards embedding MHL into the Canadian postsecondary curriculum (Boyce & Lindsay, 2019;d'Entremont et al, 2019;Lumley et al, n.d.;Stewart & Eikenaar, 2020). Taking the next step to develop, implement, and evaluate MHL courses, as we have done here, will help achieve the goals set by national guidelines.…”

Learning from Learners: Wellness seminars and self-reflections for first-year engineering students to enhance their journey in engineering education

“…From these discussions, they aim to destigmatize mental illness, raise awareness to faculty on pressures students may be facing, and inform students about resources available. At the University of British Columbia, they have implemented a similar program to ours with imbedded mental wellness interventions in their second-year mechanical engineering program [10]. The embedded workshops focused on coping strategies for managing stress.…”