Hi All,
Stress affects all Americans regardless of age, gender, race, socioeconomic status or prior life experience. Typically, those who are experiencing stress report feeling “overwhelmed, worried or run-down” (Alvord et al., n.d.). Now more than ever, college students feel stressed in the university setting (Yorke 2004). These feelings are particularly acute among first- and second-year students who may be away from home for the first time and trying to adjust to college life (Misra and McKean 2000). Hsu and Goldsmith (2021) share that “while student stress and anxiety are frequently cited as having negative effects on students’ academic performance, the role that instructors can play in mitigating these challenges is often underappreciated” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8108494/. With a focus on STEM, these researchers describe evidence-based instructional strategies and classroom interventions, that instructors may employ to address and ameliorate student stress and anxiety. Additionally, they explore the roles that instructors may play in empowering students with skills that improve their time management, studying, and approach toward learning, with an eye toward ensuring their success across all their academic endeavors.
Further, the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching has developed a teaching guide which identifies several behavioral, emotional and psychological signs of student distress and ways to minimize stress https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/keeping-stress-from-evolving-into-distress/
In a different vein – This webinar (sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education and available for download), begins a conversation about the policies and plans that college leaders and senior administrators can put in place to help ease the mental strain of faculty and staff https://www.chronicle.com/events/virtual/supporting-faculty-and-staff-mental-health. While this collection of articles are meant to address concerns about mental health in the research community: https://elifesciences.org/collections/ad8125f3/mental-health-in-academia
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