Research Initiation: Investigating Engineering Students' Engagement with Wellness Interventions

There is a critical need to improve undergraduate student well-being within engineering education. Widespread emotional stress and mental health distress among engineering undergraduates frequently result in diminished academic performance, lower student grade point averages, and increased rates of coursework discontinuation, which directly threaten the long-term pipeline of the national technical workforce. Additionally, higher levels of overall psychological health or subjective well-being are correlated with improved job performance in the workplace. This project will embed wellness modules into disciplinary engineering courses, so that all students learn vital skills for managing stress and workplace demands. The objective of this research is to investigate the mechanisms—including academic instruction, university initiatives, and societal factors—that shape how students learn about and maintain personal well-being. This project aligns with the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation program by advancing foundational knowledge on how engineering students develop the self-awareness and self-management skills vital to their success as engineers. The project will also train an engineering educator to conduct qualitative research, so that they can join and expand the community of educational researchers. This project will utilize a qualitative case-study methodology to examine how undergraduate engineering students engage with and perceive instructor-led wellness interventions embedded within standard technical courses. Three engineering instructors at different institutions will implement brief wellness modules into their disciplinary engineering courses. The project will be informed by the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) framework, which emphasizes emotion management and social skills training supported by the instructor, class, school, and community. The study will be driven by two central research questions: (1) How do in-class wellness interventions support engineering students’ development of self-awareness and self-management skills, and (2) how do students see these practices as relevant to engineering? The study participants will be recruited from students in the classes that implement the wellness modules. The project will gather and compare three primary data sources: student reflections written at the beginning, middle, and end of the academic term; the specific instructional wellness topics delivered by instructors; and semi-structured post-term qualitative interviews informed by the preceding reflections. The project team will analyze the resulting qualitative dataset using reflexive thematic analysis to understand how students learn about and apply wellness strategies. By documenting these nuanced student experiences, the study will provide a deeper understanding of the connections among classroom interventions, prior exposure to wellness programs, and students’ independent utilization of coping skills. A mentoring map model will be used to develop the principal investigator’s educational research skills through experienced mentors and an advisory board. The broader impacts of this project will include guiding faculty and institutions to optimize well-being instruction while equipping engineering undergraduates with essential emotional regulation and goal-setting competencies that directly correlate with improved academic persistence and professional performance in the STEM workforce. The project findings will be shared with engineering educators through publications and an interactive webinar with a community of practice. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.