Pedagogical approaches to support student resilience in higher-education settings: A systematic literature review

In recent years, Higher education (HE) students have continued to report rising rates of anxiety, depression and stress. One strategy employed to address these developments has been providing educational and administrative services that help to support and promote student resilience. Efforts to improve student resilience in HE may be bolstered by programs and strategies that go beyond traditional healthcare service delivery: for instance, initiatives such as in-course pedagogical approaches which target enhancing student resilience awareness and understanding. This systematic review aimed to identify, analyze, and synthesize the essential characteristics and programmatic features (e.g., methods) of pedagogical approaches (i.e., teaching strategies, curricula or other features) designed to support resilience among students in HE contexts. Searches were carried out in ERIC, PsychINFO, and SCOPUS and returned 1,545 results. Ultimately, thirty-five articles were included in the final synthesis. A three-level thematic analysis of the included thirty-five articles was conducted, in order to develop rigorous and consistent analytical themes. The five analytical themes that were subsequently developed included: 1) resilience education: reflection, understanding, awareness; 2) individual strategies: personal skill development; 3) institution- or department-level: structural, curricular opportunities; 4) interpersonal strategies: relational skill development; and 5) learning community: cohesion, integration, resource awareness. The implications and effectiveness of these themes for HE instructors are discussed

Active and Safe Routes to School: Evaluating School Travel Planning to Support Children\u27s Active Travel

Most Canadian children are not achieving their daily recommended physical activity (PA) levels despite the many emotional, psychological, and physical benefits of PA. Walking or wheeling to/from school, or active school travel (AST), is a viable method for improving children’s daily participation in PA. In Canada, the Active and Safe Routes to School initiative promotes AST through its comprehensive School Travel Planning (STP) program. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, broadly, this thesis investigates the i) implementation and ii) effectiveness of a regional, two-year STP program supporting AST. This thesis includes a systematic review of AST intervention models implemented in North America, a qualitative investigation of the program’s implementation and sustainability, and a quantitative analysis of the STP program’s impact on AST participation and perceptions. Findings are relevant to intervention facilitators and evaluators, school administrators, public health practitioners, local law enforcement agencies, community planners, and parents

Active School Travel Intervention Methodologies in North America: A Systematic Review

Context: As children’s lifestyles have become increasingly sedentary, active school travel can be a relatively accessible way to increase their daily physical activity. In recent years, several different models of interventions have been utilized to promote children participating in active school travel. This review documents and analyzes the different active school travel intervention methodologies that have been used in North America (Canada or U.S.) by collecting, organizing, and evaluating data relating to all phases of active school travel interventions. Evidence acquisition: This systematic review developed a key word search and applied it in six databases (BIOSIS Previews, GeoBase, PubMed, SCOPUS, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science) to gather scholarly literature. A total of 22 studies evaluating children’s active school travel interventions in a North American setting (four Canada, 18 U.S.) were identified for the period between January 2010 and March 2017. Evidence synthesis: Applying the Safe Routes to School Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, Equity, and Evaluation (“6 E’s”) framework, interventions were thematically assessed for their structure and organization, approaches and methods, and outcomes and discussions. Encouragement and education were the most commonly observed themes within the different methodologies of the studies reviewed. Details relating to intervention approaches and methods were common; whereas data relating to intervention structure and organization received much less attention. Conclusions: Kingdon’s multiple streams approach was applied to frame the findings for program facilitators and evaluators. Within the multiple streams approach, several considerations are offered to address and potentially improve active school travel intervention conceptualization, partnerships, organization, and evaluation

Active travel behaviour in the family environment: protocol for the mixed-methods cross-sectional ARRIVE study

IntroductionActive travel is an important source of physical activity and a primary contributor to overall health among adolescents. To understand and promote active travel behaviour in adolescents, developing a more robust understanding of the predictors of active travel and its associated decision-making processes is needed. Situated within a theoretical socioecological framework for adolescent travel behaviour, the mixed-methods Active tRavel behavioR in the famIly enVironmEnt study aims to quantitatively assess the influence of several predictors of adolescent travel behaviour, and to qualitatively understand the associated decision-making processes of both adolescents and parents.Methods and analysisOur mixed-methods approach will feature online surveys and semistructured interviews. The online questionnaire, developed in accordance with a theoretical framework of adolescent active travel, will examine adolescent travel behaviour with respect to four different destinations while controlling for multiple relevant individual, social and physical environment factors. To enable the comparison of adolescent and parental perspectives, the questionnaire will be answered by a representative sample of German adolescents (11–15 years old) and their parents.Our semistructured interviews, likewise framed based on the central tenets of the theoretical framework of adolescent active travel, will seek to explore the decision-making process of families regarding travel mode choice via conducting interviews with each member (ie, father, mother, adolescent). To investigate travel decision-making processes, adolescents and their parents will be invited to talk about trips they undertook using both active and passive transport modes during the last week. Thematic analyses will be conducted to highlight the central concerns, priorities and values of participants’ decision-making processes.Ethics and disseminationThis study has received ethical approval from the ethics commission of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Study results will be disseminated at scientific conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. Additionally, study findings will be made publicly available to relevant health, policy, and research stakeholders and groups

Urban and architectural design for the young mind: An ecological investigation of the relationship between urban form and adolescent mental health

Around 50% of lifetime mental illnesses begin at or prior to the age of 14 years old—or roughly halfway through adolescence (10-19 years old)—with contemporary trends from multiple geographical and cultural contexts indicating upward trends in various conditions (e.g., anxiety, depression). Concomitant to these developments in adolescent mental health trends, the global population continues to urbanize portending that a higher proportion of adolescents will experience these critical developmental years in such environs. Together the coalescing of these health and migration trends suggests that the role and influence of urban environments in the mental health and well-being of adolescents will be especially important in the coming years. Common paths of research regarding the mental health of younger populations, however, have tended to focus on individual psychosocial issues and physiological factors, subsequently leaving comparatively little knowledge about the specific urban design influences of adolescent mental health and well-being. Further research investigating more robust associations between precise urban environment design characteristics and adolescent mental health outcomes, along with a greater diversity of methods, is warranted for both advancing scholarship on this topic and informing professional practice in relevant fields such as urban planning and public health. This dissertation provides an exploratory mixed methods evaluation of the relationships between specific urban and architectural designs and adolescent mental health indicators (i.e., emotional responses). Guiding this evaluation is the overarching question: “What is the nature of the relationship between specific urban built and natural design concepts and adolescent mental health indicators (i.e., emotional responses)?” Overall, seven chapters comprise this dissertation with five featuring as integrated articles. After the introduction (Chapter 1), the first of the integrated articles (Chapter 2) reviews and synthesizes literature from across the fields of planning and public health, as well as the emerging transdisciplinary area of neurourbanism. The resulting syntheses of this review highlight how planning and public health have traditionally understood the relationships between health and urban environments, and subsequently how these relationships are being investigated using contemporary methods. From this background, the reviewed literature is then specifically applied to delineate the multilevel nature of the relationship between young people’s mental health and urban environments, and how this topic may be studied and supported through future inter/transdisciplinary research and practice collaborations. To this end, the review offers two novel, socioecological model-based frameworks that include a new fifth level (i.e., the digital level) for both practice and research to consider in future endeavours. Building from the review of the previous chapter and narrowing in more specifically on urban design and adolescent mental health, the following four integrated articles are primary research manuscripts that are framed within the ecological perspective of the Theory of Affordances (ToA). This framing consequently facilitated the development of insights that take into account and explore a variety of influences including social, psychological, physiological, relational, and environmental factors that may be relevant to the relationships under study. Using this approach three separate primary research studies were conducted to explore the relationships between specific urban designs (i.e., pedestrian- and transit-oriented designs (PTOD), cognitive architecture (CA) concepts) and adolescent mental health indicators (i.e., the emotional responses of: positive affect, negative affect, calmness, anxiousness, perceived restorativeness, mental demand). The first primary research integrated article, Chapter 3, submits the results of 23 qualitative go-along interviews that were conducted with adolescents in settings throughout downtown Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Findings from the qualitative analysis illustrate the considerably different perceptions that adolescents hold regarding a variety of PTODs—for instance, natural versus built enclosure and imageability—and their generally positive perspectives pertaining to the CA concepts examined. The second and third primary research articles, Chapters 4 and 5, present the findings of an online survey featuring a nationally representative sample of 1,500 Canadian adolescents. The former manuscript (i.e., Chapter 4) explores the associations between overall environmental design quality (i.e., areas scored for PTOD quality) and adolescent mental health indicators and finds that, generally, as the aggregated PTOD quality of a setting increased, positive emotional responses also tended to increase while negative responses typically decreased. The latter online survey paper (i.e., Chapter 5) examines associations between specific PTOD concepts (i.e., complexity, enclosure, human scale, imageability, transparency) and adolescent emotional responses. Results from this chapter indicate that the specific design concepts of transparency (increases in positive affect, calmness, and restorativeness), scale (increase in positive affect decrease in negative affect) and complexity (increase in positive affect, decrease in negative affect) may be particularly effectual design concepts for adolescents. Chapter 6, the final integrated article, presents the findings of the EMA survey study which was conducted with 70 adolescent participants also in the downtown area of Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. This study concludes by reiterating the potential of natural forms imageability and enclosure and instances of biophilic architecture (i.e., urban gardens) in environmental design (as noted in Chapter 3), while also suggesting that the potential benefits of PTODs in auto-oriented spaces (e.g., public transit areas) may be offset by a lack of opportunity for adolescents to develop symbolic and stylistic attachments in these settings. Chapter 7 summates the methodological and research contributions of the five integrated articles contained within the dissertation via a triangulation of key shared ideas and points among their collective findings. Contextualized within the ToA, the final chapter’s synthesis suggests two important contributions from this scholarship. First, is that it provides a detailed documentation of the mental health implications of design quality and composition with respect to affording positive social contexts and interaction opportunities, emotionally engaging public spaces, and active use experiences. Discussions of this contribution are expanded to note its implications with respect to adolescent place attachment. And second, this dissertation offers a comprehensive exploratory investigation of the mental health implications of adolescent perceptions of and emotional responses to urban designs which resulted in the identification of trends suggesting a seeming emphasis regarding usage opportunities, safety, distinctiveness, visual richness, and positive affect experiences. The implications of this contribution are connected to better understanding and designing for adolescent place preferences. Future research opportunities are detailed for additional mixed methods studies, environment-based interventions, work with practitioners, and policy analyses

Applying the multiphase optimization strategy to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of an online road safety education intervention for children and parents: a pilot study

Abstract Background Reports of children’s engagement in active transportation outline low participation rates in many countries despite many associated mental, physical, and social health benefits. One of the main contributors to this phenomenon is a cited lack of education and knowledge among children regarding active travel (AT), specifically road safety. To address this issue, the aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of an online road safety education intervention to promote AT among children and their parents. Methods Applying the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) for intervention development, implementation, and evaluation, we designed and assessed a four-module online road safety education intervention with a sample of 57 parent-child dyads using a 23 factorial design featuring both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Results Main intervention feasibility findings include positive and critical feedback on the program’s content and design, and moderate participant engagement as reflected by program retention and completion rates. With respect to the preliminary intervention effectiveness on children, a significant improvement in road safety knowledge scores was observed for groups that feature the “wheeling safety and skills” module. Slight improvements in AT knowledge scores across all the intervention groups were observed, but were not of significance. Preliminary intervention effectiveness on select parental AT practices and perceptions saw significant improvements in some groups. Groups that featured the ‘wheeling safety and skills’ module exhibited significantly higher guided choice scores upon completion of the program than those who did not receive this component. Conclusion The MOST framework allowed us to design and evaluate the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of an online road safety education intervention. The developed intervention has demonstrated that it has the potential to improve children’s road safety knowledge and some areas of parental AT practices and perceptions, to which improvements may be attributed to the inclusion of the “wheeling safety and skills” module, suggesting that the targeted focus on cycling skills is a prioritized area. AT programming and practice implications are discussed. Future research is encouraged to refine modules to better reflect the priorities of children and parents and to test these refined components among larger samples. Word count 9,391 (excludes abstract, tables, figures, abbreviations, and references)

Supporting active school travel: A qualitative analysis of implementing a regional safe routes to school program

Physical inactivity among children is a significant public health concern. Active school travel (AST) methods, such as walking and wheeling to school, can be a valuable way to increase children\u27s levels of daily physical activity. In Canada, Active and Safe Routes to School (ASRTS), a national health promotion initiative, has led the campaign for AST through its flagship school travel plan (STP) program. At present little is known about the onthe-ground implementation processes that impede or facilitate the success of STPs. Through a thematic analysis of 18 interviews with STP facilitators and 4 focus groups with the larger STP committees, our study evaluates the factors shaping the functioning of STP interventions at ten elementary schools participating in a regional ASRTS program in Southwestern Ontario. Our analysis yielded six themes that have implications for STP implementation and sustainability: 1) accounting for school context; 2) establishing committee capacity and leadership; 3) supporting STP action; 4) responsiveness to external and internal barriers; 5) engaging schools at the grassroots level; and 6) building future champions. We draw from Lewin\u27s Field Theory and discuss the forces affecting STP committees to frame our findings in a way that

Supporting children’s participation in active travel: developing an online road safety intervention through a collaborative integrated knowledge translation approach

Even though regular engagement in physical activity (PA) among children can support their development and encourage the adoption of healthy lifelong habits, most do not achieve their recommended guidelines. Active travel (AT), or any form of human-powered travel (e.g., walking), can be a relatively accessible, manageable, and sustainable way to promote children’s PA. One common barrier to children’s engagement in AT, however, is a reported lack of education and training. To support children’s participation in AT, this paper presents the development of a comprehensive 4-module online road safety education intervention designed to improve children’s knowledge and confidence regarding AT. Using a qualitative integrated knowledge translation (iKT) approach undertaken with community collaborators (n = 50) containing expertise in health promotion, public safety, school administration, and transportation planning, our inductive thematic analysis generated fourth themes which constituted the foundation of the intervention modules: Active Travel Knowledge: Awareness of Benefits and Participation; Pedestrian Safety and Skills: Roles, Responsibilities, and Rules; Signs and Infrastructure: Identification, Literacy, and Behaviour; Wheeling Safety and Skills: Technical Training and Personal Maneuvers. Each theme/module was then linked to an explicit learning objective and connected to complementary knowledge activities, resources, and skill development exercises. Implications for research and practice are discussed