Promoting wellbeing and coping skills in higher education

For the purpose of trying to create a structure to see the key influences that relate to student stress, I separated the sources of stress from their effects and from how students cope. This is an over-simplification of course, the sources and effects of stress and how students cope are all inter-related and bi-directional. The significance of a source of stress depends on one’s current wellbeing and this is affected by how well one has and is coping. It was mentioned in chapter 8, for example, that responses to stress can become new stressors, such as loneliness as a response to stress (McIntyre et al., 2018) and this response interacts with other stressors, such as the student’s experience of academic stress to lead to a greater impact on academic outcome. Moreover, students with an earlier history of childhood trauma were more likely to experience more adverse outcomes on wellbeing, health and academic performance compared with students who did not report earlier trauma. This illustrates how sources of stress and their effects and coping are all inter-connected.
Intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of academic achievement. It is as strong as any personality ingredient (Schneider & Preckel, 2017). However, it is not covered in this analysis because academic achievement is just one outcome and personality and other influences on coping have a stronger influence, than intelligence, on wellbeing (Schneider & Preckel, 2017). Proxies for intelligence are the qualification students enter university with and as this is set by university admissions criteria, it means that intelligence, compared to personality, is more similar across any given cohort. Personality and the influences on coping are more variable and the evidence offered suggests they are more adaptable or at least the cognitive processes that underlie them are, in relation to their influence on wellbeing, mood, motivation, satisfaction and health. In covering these influences on how students cope, please try to be aware on how you could incorporate some of these insights into the work you do with your students.