Students Wellbeing and Mental Health

Overview

Concerns about student mental health are not new, but they have become more visible, and maybe more complex in recent years. Instructors often find themselves in a difficult position: a drop in participation that doesn’t quite recover, a student who disappears mid-semester, emails that arrive late at night, carrying more than just questions about assignments. Students are navigating stress, anxiety, burnout, and uncertainty, while the classroom remains a space with its own expectations and intellectual demands. They are navigating academic expectations alongside broader uncertainties: about their futures, their communities, and the world around them. For many, the classroom is just one layer of a much more complex emotional and cognitive landscape.

It’s easy to start wondering where the line is: what conversations belong in the classroom and what doesn’t?

There’s sometimes a quiet assumption underneath all of this: that supporting wellbeing might mean lowering expectations, or softening the intellectual edge of a course. But the research, and the lived experience of many instructors, points in a different direction. Teaching itself can be understood as an act of care. As bell hooks (2003) describes it, “Caring educators open the mind, allowing students to embrace a world of knowing that is always subject to change and challenge” (p. 9). Paulo Freire similarly describes teaching as a form of engagement with students as whole people, not just recipients of content. In practice, this does not require dramatic changes and it doesn’t mean instructors are responsible for fixing student wellbeing. But the way a course is designed–its pacing, its clarity, its tone–can either add friction or remove it. An attentiveness to course design is ultimately an attentiveness to uplifting students’ experiences. That means your course can contribute to increasing a student’s sense of wellbeing not just for a single course, but for their whole university experience.

Course Design: Where Wellbeing Often Begins

Wellbeing in a course is rarely the result of a single policy or gesture. It is shaped, more fundamentally, by how the course is designed: how work is structured, how expectations are communicated, and how students move through the term. In that sense, wellbeing is not something added to a course, it is built into it.

Clarify What Students Are Being Asked to Do

One of the most common sources of student stress is “hidden curriculum” uncertainty. Students are often trying to figure out:

• What actually matters in this course?
• What does good work look like?
• How will I be evaluated?

When expectations are unclear, students spend time interpreting the course instead of engaging with the material.

Designing for wellbeing here means making expectations explicit:

• clearly defined learning goals
• transparent grading criteria
• examples of successful work

Research on transparent assignment design shows that when expectations are clearly communicated, students perform better and report lower levels of confusion and anxiety (Winkelmes et al., 2016).

Sequence Work in Ways Students Can Sustain

The second design decision is how work unfolds over time. Students rarely experience workload within a single course. They experience it across all of their commitments. Even well-designed assignments can become overwhelming when they cluster together or when feedback comes too late to be useful. Stress increases significantly when students perceive workload as unmanageable, particularly when multiple high-stakes tasks occur at once (Misra & McKean, 2000). Designing for wellbeing here means paying attention to pacing:

• spacing major assignments across the term
• providing lower-stakes practice before high-stakes work
• ensuring feedback arrives early enough to inform improvement

The goal is not to reduce challenge, but to distribute it in ways students can engage with over time.

Build in Clear Paths for Recovery

No course unfolds exactly as planned for every student. Some students will fall behind (because of illness, competing responsibilities, or simply misjudging how long something would take.) When a course has no built-in flexibility, these moments often lead to disengagement rather than recovery. Designing for wellbeing means planning for this in advance. Some approaches tend to be structured rather than ad hoc:

• dropping a lowest score
• allowing a limited number of extensions
• offering alternative ways to participate or demonstrate learning

These policies provide support while maintaining consistency and fairness. In contrast, case-by-case flexibility often depends on who feels comfortable asking, which can introduce inequities. Our page on Flexible Instructional Strategies provides even more in-depth options on how to build in a degree of flexibility in your course design from the very start.

Clear and Supportive Communication

Students are often trying to answer a simple question: Is this a place where I belong and can succeed?

The answer is shaped not only by what the course requires, but by how those requirements are communicated; through the syllabus, through assignment descriptions, and through what happens in the classroom. Supporting student wellbeing here does not require changing what you expect. It requires being intentional about how expectations are framed and explained. This is also where care becomes visible in teaching.

Frame Expectations in Supporting Ways

When policies and assignments are written primarily in prohibitive or procedural language, students may interpret them as arbitrary or punitive. This can increase anxiety without improving performance. Research on syllabus tone shows that more supportive and explanatory language is associated with higher perceptions of instructor approachability and course clarity (Harnish & Bridges, 2011).

Explain the Purpose Behind Course Decisions

Students are more likely to engage with course requirements when they understand why those requirements exist. When expectations are presented without explanation, students may experience them as hurdles rather than as part of a learning process. In practice, this can be as simple as:

• briefly explaining why an assignment is structured a certain way
• clarifying how an activity connects to course goals
• naming common challenges and how students can approach them

Respond to Classroom Moments in Ways That Maintain Connection

Not all communication is planned. Some of the most impactful moments happen in real time. There are moments when broader events or shared challenges affect students’ ability to focus. In these cases, even brief acknowledgment can help situate the classroom as a space that is aware rather than disconnected. This does not require turning the course into a discussion of current events. It can be as simple as acknowledging that students may be navigating competing demands or maybe briefly naming disruptions that may affect attention or participation.

Trauma-informed and humanizing pedagogical approaches encourage brief acknowledgment of the broader conditions students may be navigating, without requiring the class to shift away from its academic focus. A brief "I know many of you are navigating a lot of external stress this week, so let's take a moment to reset before we dive into today's topic", situates the classroom as a human space (Imad, 2021.) If you want an even deeper dive into how you can approach difficult classroom conversations with care, our page on A Social Justice Approach to Teaching in Difficult Times provides even more facilitation options.

Assessment and Stress

Assessment can be one of the drivers of student stress in a course. It can affect how students study, how they approach tasks, and how they interpret their own performance. There are two aspects of assessment design that tend to matter most:

Calibrate Stakes and Frequency

One of the most consequential decisions is how much weight is placed on individual assessments. A useful question for instructors is not only what an assessment measures, but also what kind of pressure it creates. High-stakes exams often concentrate pressure in ways that can increase anxiety and reduce opportunities for students to learn from mistakes. When a large portion of the grade depends on one or two moments, students have limited ability to recover or adjust their approach.

In contrast, incorporating more frequent, lower-stakes assessments allows students to practice, receive feedback, and improve over time. Research on retrieval practice shows that repeated opportunities to recall and apply knowledge improve long-term retention (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Dunlosky et al., 2013). In practice, this might include:

• short quizzes
• drafts or scaffolded assessment
• in-class or online knowledge checks

Make Evaluation Criteria Explicit

A second key factor is how clearly students understand what is expected. When criteria are unclear, students often experience assessments as unpredictable and this uncertainty increases anxiety that can lead to inefficient or misdirected effort. When we clearly communicate the purpose of an assignment, the task itself, and how it will be evaluated, students perform better and report greater confidence in their ability to succeed. Designing for clarity includes:

• providing rubrics
• sharing examples of strong work
• explaining common mistakes or misconceptions

Normalize Campus Support

Our campus offers a wide range of support services, from counseling to advising, disability services, and basic needs support. Yet many students who could benefit from these services do not use them.

Consider including support services in the syllabus. Student Learning Center has a wide range of programs to support students at UC Berkeley. Review their program page and bring awareness to these supports in your syllabus, bCourses, or provide an announcement about ways to access these resources for students. Also, students are more likely to use resources when they are mentioned in context; at moments when the need is more visible (for example, before high-stakes assessments). The Gold Folder also offers guidance for faculty on recognizing and responding to students in distress.

Normalize help-seeking as part of being a student. When resources are framed as tools that many students use as part of navigating academic life, they become more accessible.