Welcome to this month's edition of Researching education: Five further readings. In this series, we take a look at some further readings available on a particular topic, including open access research papers from various online databases, and Teacher archive content you might not have come across yet.
Issues of anxiety, stress and mental health can affect students at any age. In particular, as the world continues to grapple with the emotional toll of this pandemic, having strategies in place to support students through these challenges is important. In this edition of Researching education: Five further readings, we take you through a variety of resources on the toping of student wellbeing.
- Social wellbeing in secondary schools. This report was recently featured in the Cunningham Library Catalogue, an open access resource filled with Australian education research material. It's continually being updated and includes journals, government reports and books. At the time of writing, there are 147 resources available on the topic of student wellbeing. You can explore all the resources here. This particular report, Social wellbeing in secondary schools, was published by the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education and looks at data researchers have collected on the wellbeing of secondary school students and their key stressors and challenges, such as mental health and body image.
- Drawing on creative arts therapy approaches to enhance inclusive school cultures and student wellbeing. From the Issues in Educational Research journal, this paper on creative arts therapy approaches can be found through EdResearch Online, which contains hundreds of articles from Australian education journals, some of which are open access. This paper presents a literature review on additional and re-imagined arts education programs for schools, which the authors say points to the value of creative art therapies for students currently experiencing mental health problems or considered at-risk. If you'd like to explore more resources featured in EdResearch Online relating to student wellbeing, follow this link.
- Student wellbeing hub. The student wellbeing hub is a resource developed by Education Services Australia for the Australian Government Department of Education. It is also the home of the Australian Student Wellbeing Framework. At the student wellbeing hub, you can explore resources on respectful relationships, professional learning courses some of the latest evidence and research into student wellbeing.
- Improving social and emotional learning in primary schools: Guidance report. This guidance report from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in the United Kingdom has been published to assist primary schools in supporting the social and emotional development of children. The paper unpacks what social and emotional learning is, and discusses six recommendations the EEF has made. ‘We identified a group of core skills and strategies that occur frequently in social and emotional learning programmes that have good evidence of impact, and suggest ways of embedding these in the classroom and beyond,' Sir Kevin Collins, Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, writes in the foreword of the report.
- A new tool to monitor whole-school mental health promotion. In this article, Katherine Dix, Senior Research Fellow at ACER, shares the details of the Survey of School Promotion of Emotional and Social Health (SSPESH), which measures implementation of mental health promotion at a whole-school level. ‘Assessing program implementation in this way not only describes a school's current functioning, allowing it to better meet the social and emotional needs of its community, but can be used to measure progress over time and against other schools,' she writes.
The Cunningham Library membership is open to individuals, schools and organisations. Membership includes access to a comprehensive collection of education research literature; weekday alerts to a selection of Australian education news; fast supply of articles and books from the collection; support in finding research; and an integrated online search tool that works across all our resources. To become a library member, visit the website.
