Evaluation of “Healthy Learning. Together”, an Easily Applicable Mental Health Promotion Tool for Students Aged 9 to 18 Years

Abstract

Schools play an important role in adolescents’ health promotion. Due to the limited resources of teachers, there is a need for short-time interventions that can be easily implemented in a regular class without extensive training. Therefore, the tool “Healthy learning. Together.” was developed within a joint venture research project in Jena, Germany. The tool consists of a box with 60 exercises and a poster exhibition for students in 5th grade and higher. One thousand one hundred and forty four (1144) students (56 % female) from nine schools were assessed at an interval of 10 weeks in a parallelized pre-post-design with class-wise assignment to intervention group (IG) and control group (CG). In the IG, regular teachers implemented the health promotion tool. Before and after the intervention social integration, class climate, self-efficacy (as primary outcomes) and mental and physical wellbeing (as secondary outcomes) were measured using standardized questionnaires. ANCOVA analysis revealed that students of the IG showed more positive changes on primary outcomes with small effect sizes. Additional implementation outcomes showed high teacher and student enthusiasm but sometimes low exposure rates. Regarding the relatively small amount of time and preparation for teachers to get noticeable effects, the introduced tool is suitable as a first step into health promotion for schools.

School educational models and child mental health among K-12 students: a scoping review

“…Curricula focusing on SEL put an emphasis on the development of child social-emotional skills such as managing emotions, coping skills and empathy [ 23 ], and showed positive effects on depression, anxiety, stress, negative affect and emotional problems [ 23 – 37 ], especially in children with psychological symptoms [ 24 ] and girls [ 23 , 27 ], as well as increased prosocial behaviors [ 38 ], self-esteem [ 39 – 42 ] and positive affect [ 43 ]. However, four programs reported non-significant effects of SEL on student mental health outcomes [ 44 – 47 ], while two programs demonstrated increased levels of anxiety [ 48 ] and a reduction of subjective well-being [ 49 ] at post-intervention. Mindfulness-based curriculum showed its potential to endorse positive outcomes for youth including reduced emotional problems and negative affect [ 50 – 56 ] as well as increased well-being and positive emotions [ 51 , 52 , 57 – 60 ], especially among high-risk children with emotional problems or perceived stress before interventions [ 50 , 53 ].…”

Contributions of universal school-based mental health promotion to the wellbeing of adolescents and preadolescents: a systematic review of educational interventions

“…There was a wide range of study sample sizes; one study had fewer than 100 participants (Kirby et al, 2021), three had 100-200 participants (McMullen and McMullen, 2018;Raval et al, 2019;Veltro et al, 2017), four had 200-400 participants (Gigantesco et al, 2015;Green et al, 2021;Kelley et al, 2021;Punukollu et al, 2020), four had 700-1,500 participants (Chisholm et al, 2016;Lapshina et al, 2019;Pannebakker et al, 2019;Schwager et al, 2019) and two had over 2,000 participants (Dray et al, 2017;Wigelsworth et al, 2012).…”

“…Social and emotional aspects were identified in 11 studies. This domain was included in programs targeting SEL (Green et al, 2021;Kelley et al, 2021;Kirby et al, 2021;Lapshina et al, 2019;Raval et al, 2019;Wigelsworth et al, 2012), social skills (Pannebakker et al, 2019), emotional education (Schwager et al, 2019), communication skills (Dray et al, 2017;Green et al, 2021;Lapshina et al, 2019) et al, 2020). Other resilience skills were included in 8 interventions.…”

“…Other resilience skills were included in 8 interventions. This dimension was included in the curricula of programs aiming for resilience improvement (Dray et al, 2017;Kelley et al, 2021), life skills (McMullen and McMullen, 2018;Schwager et al, 2019;Veltro et al, 2017), coping skills (Punukollu et al, 2020), and problem-solving skills (Dray et al, 2017;Gigantesco et al, 2015;Green et al, 2021;Veltro et al, 2017).…”

Kurz-Skala zur Erfassung wahrgenommener sozialer Teilhabe (KsT-5): faktorielle Struktur, interne Konsistenz, inhaltliche und konvergente Validität sowie Normwerte in einer repräsentativen Stichprobe

“…Beide Gesundheitsaspekte stehen in enger Verbindung mit dem Selbstwert und der Selbstwirksamkeit einer Person, die wiederum auch mit den sozialen Aspekten von Teilhabe in Zusammenhang stehen. In 2 kürzlich erschienenen Publikationen im Verbundprojekt "VorteilJena" ("Vorbeugen durch Teilhabe" BMBF 01KK1401A; Laufzeit 10/2014-09/2018 [14]) konnte soziale Teilhabe bei Jugendlichen, operationalisiert als Wir-Gefühl im Schulunterricht, in einem experimentellen Prä-Post-Design als signifikanter Prädiktor für Gesundheit, mit Selbstwert/Selbstwirksamkeit als Mediator, identifiziert werden [15,16].…”