By Shu-Min Liao (Amherst College)
Information
Public concerns about students’ mental health have been rising across the past decade. In response to local and national calls for institutions of higher learning to attend to student well-being and social inequities, we created a new course called “Happy Intro Stats” (HIS) at our U.S.-based liberal arts college in Fall 2022 with 25 students enrolled. This is an interactive and fully inclusive introductory statistics course designed to address the importance of self-care on mental health and help students understand inequities in mental health status and access via statistical investigations. This course is offered with minimum barriers – no prerequisites, no expectations on prior coding experience, and no costs for the textbook and software – and maximum support through student-centered designs and inclusive pedagogies. This pilot research project studies the impact of embedded self-care practices and inclusive pedagogies on undergraduate student mental health and learning, especially how those intentional designs promote inclusion and students’ sense of belonging in class. A comparative study based on multiple surveys through the semester is conducted between this HIS course and our existing intro stats course - which requires calculus as a prerequisite, uses a pricey textbook, and is taught without aforementioned interventions.