WiSER@Waterloo: Implementing and Evaluating Evidence-Based Practices for Student Wellbeing, Belonging, and Equity

Grant Recipients

Carrie Mitchell, School of Planning

Kathryn S. Plaisance, Knowledge Integration

Christine Logel, Social Development Studies

(Project timeline: May 2024 - April 2025)

This project will launch, and assess, a new teaching initiative: Wellbeing in Student Education and Research (WiSER@Waterloo).
- Instructors will be trained to implement evidence-based pedagogical approaches and activities in their undergraduate courses from a library of freely available practices that have been shown to improve student wellbeing and to support more equitable outcomes.
This project will assess the effectiveness of these practices on multiple facets of student wellbeing including belonging, engagement, trust, and connection.

Integrate evidence-based practices related to student belonging, equity, and wellbeing into two undergraduate programs in a UW faculty.
Assess the feasibility of using the College Transition Collaborative’s (CTC) free, validated Practices Library to support instructors’ implementation of belonging, equity, and wellbeing practices in a variety of classroom settings.
Evaluate the effectiveness of tools from the CTC Practices Library for students at Waterloo using the free, validated Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS) Ascend survey.
Create a community-of-practice among participating instructors and students to assess the feasibility of scaling this intervention within our Faculty, and across campus.
Compile a “lessons learned” handbook for instructors and disseminate widely (e.g., via teaching & learning conferences, CTE website, OER, etc.)
Apply our own lessons to improve the WiSER@Waterloo initiative for the following year.