Education for Mental Health project

Have you adapted your teaching practice with student mental health in mind, or have a curriculum that you think might have an impact on student mental health? If so, the Education for Mental Health team would like to hear from you!! 

What is the Education for Mental Health project about? 

We are working to understand how we can develop and adapt pedagogy (that is, how we teach), curriculum and assessment design to support better mental well-being among students. 

We are evaluating modules/programme of events/interventions which have been developed with student well-being in mind OR are thought to have a positive impact on student well-being. This is broad in definition as we want to capture a range of evidence. For example, we are interested in hearing about efforts to incorporate stress management, goal setting, core study skills, mindfulness, mental health awareness, coping skills, etc into programmes of study. We are also interested in learning more about the effect of efforts to adapt pedagogy to scaffold and support students or alter assessment design to reduce student stress.  
Our evaluations include anonymous online surveys pre and post modules/programme of events/interventions examining the change in wellbeing (quantitative) and student focus groups (qualitative).  
We are working with the University of Derby who will take evidence from us and other sources to develop an online national toolkit to provide examples of good evidence for creating and delivering curriculum/assessment to better facilitate student mental well-being. This is part of an Office for Students Challenge Competition project. 
Why take part? 

• We can run evaluations on your behalf, something which you might not have the time to put together, to examine how your current teaching practice impacts student wellbeing. For example, we will create online surveys and help with distribution, in addition to running student focus groups. 
• We can gain a deeper insight into student perceptions of current teaching practice and their thoughts on how to improve student wellbeing at university.  
• We will analyse all data on your behalf and pool together with other evaluations to understand the ‘bigger picture’. We are happy to share our overall research outputs with you.  
• We can connect you to other academics interested in this area to facilitate wider conversations around student mental wellbeing.  

 
Who is leading this project? 
The project is funded by Office for Students and KCL is collaborating with the University of Derby, Aston University, Student Minds and Advance HE. 
At KCL the project is being led by Dr Nicola Byrom and Dr Juliet Foster in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, with the support of collaborators across the IoPPN, the faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, the English Department and Kings Academy. The project is being supported by research associate, Rebecca Upsher.  
What would we need from you? 
In order to run evaluations, we would start by asking you a few questions about your module/programme of events/intervention to gain insight into its aims and logistics i.e. when the module starts/ends.  
Support us to identify a suitable control group 

For the quantitative surveys, we would be looking for a control group i.e. students who have not received your module/programme of events/intervention preferably from the same, or similar programme of study. This might involve a) trying to sample the whole year or b) getting your help to identify another module leader who is running a module/programme of events/intervention which does not have a student wellbeing component.  
If your module/programme of events/intervention is compulsory for all students we would probably want to focus more on qualitative evaluations (i.e. more student focus groups), but happy to discuss running online surveys if there is a possibility of a control group (for example, if the students receive the module at different time points).  

Assist with advertising the study 

We would need your help in advertising the online survey and / or focus groups to the students (or we can do this if you give us KEATs access). 
Take part in a 60-minute semi-structured interview 

We would like to give you some questions about your modules/programme of events/interventions so we can write up a case study. This can be scheduled at a time that works for you. 
For more information please get in touch: rebecca.j.upsher@kcl.ac.uk