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)

Description

  • 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.

Project Objectives

  • 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.

References

Reference documents (pdf)