The Impact of Gratitude Journaling on CS1 Students

Mental health crises among post-secondary Computer Science students are persistent and growing concerns as students are prone to high stress levels and feelings of anxiety and depression  [1]. Although this issue is not unique to Computer Science, the prevalence of mental health issues in STEM  [1] makes it extremely important for CS educators to find ways to support student well-being within their courses. One potential technique to help alleviate some of the negative feelings students face is for courses to incorporate mental wellness interventions that aim to improve students’ psychological well-being. This poster discusses an attempt at engaging students in such an intervention – weekly gratitude journaling – in an online CS1 course.

We conducted a quasi-experimental study in a CS1 course to explore the following research questions:

We collected data from 247 consenting students; roughly half of the students (n = 129) were randomly assigned to be part of the experimental group. These students received a weekly gratitude journaling prompt asking them to list three things they were grateful for that week. The question was included at the end of a low-stakes, untimed, online reading quiz which students were required to complete each week prior to lectures. The question was labelled ‘optional’ and students were informed that this meant their responses to the question would have no impact on their course grade. The remaining students (n = 118) acted as the control group; their weekly reading quizzes did not include this extra, optional question. Otherwise, all students had the same readings, lectures, assignments and tests.

In addition, at the beginning and end of the semester, all students completed surveys that both contained the ten-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) [2] and the five-item Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) [3].

A key finding from this study was that students who completed the weekly gratitude journals experienced a statistically significant improvement in their self-reported life satisfaction. That is, the improvement in life satisfaction (as measured by the difference between a student’s SWLS score at the beginning and end of the semester) was significantly greater for the students in the experimental group compared to the control group.

However, no such significant difference was found for improvement in student stress levels from the beginning to the end of the semester. In fact, all students regardless of which group they were in reported significantly higher stress at the end of the semester.

Our poster will share details of this quantitative analysis of the term’s survey results. Although our study results found no evidence that gratitude journaling reduces stress (RQ1), the finding that gratitude journaling may improve students’ life satisfaction (RQ2) presents instructors with a a simple mental wellness intervention tool which may help improve student well-being within courses.