Assessing Effectiveness of Mental Health Assemblies
Advisor: Teacher Jasica
Internship Location: HKN Physician Practice: 899 Santa Cruz Ave #200, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (Virtual)
Onsite Mentor: Dr. Hari Nair
Globally, it’s estimated that 1 in 7 adolescents experience some form of a mental disorder, and just within the United States, 20% of high schoolers in 2023 reported experiencing suicidal ideation. Statistics like this highlight the urgency and seriousness with which we must approach the youth mental health crisis. However, while educating and raising awareness about mental health early on has been proven to be effective within school systems, integrating a full-blown mental health course into the curriculum would not be feasible for most schools. Assemblies, on the other hand, are easily implementable and readily available ways through which schools can raise awareness about mental health early.
Through this project, I will analyze the effectiveness of mental health assemblies in improving knowledge and changing attitudes about mental health amongst middle schoolers at BIFU, in the hopes of finding an easy and effective method through which schools can fight against the youth mental health crisis. Additionally, by administering a pre-assembly and post-assembly survey that also collects demographic data, I will analyze whether gender identity, grade level, or ethnicity plays a role in the reception and change brought on by these assemblies.
Project Blog
Week 0: Blog: Welcome to my project!
Hey, you amazing academics!
My name is Shreyas, and I want to officially welcome you to my senior project blogs! Over the next few months, I will be giving you guys a behind-the-scenes look at my project as we travel through all the ups (and downs) together. But before I can tell you all about my project and what I hope to accomplish, let me tell you guys a little bit about myself and why this project matters to me.
In middle school, as many kids do, I went through a period of mental health struggle unlike anything I have ever experienced before or since. In that struggle, I not only felt completely isolated, but I also felt wholly underprepared to navigate my mental health and had to figure out many things for myself. I vividly remember sitting in my bed searching up terms like “depression” and “anxiety”, and although these are now terms I am incredibly familiar with, I sometimes forget that I learned about them through Psych2Go videos and random Reddit forums.
Although I have grown from that experience and have since figured out how to navigate my mental health and practice self-care, I still remember feeling completely and utterly lost in a world filled with big terms where neither my peers nor I knew what mental health really even was. That experience showed me the value in having school-based mental health education, because even if it really was just one assembly, feeling heard and understanding what was happening to my peers or me could’ve been all we needed.
Now that the motivation behind my project is clear, let’s take a bit to talk about what I’ll actually be doing. In this project, I will (hopefully) be determining the effectiveness of one-time mental health assemblies in raising awareness about mental health amongst middle schoolers. To do this, I will first have to split the participants I randomly select into control and experimental groups, where the experimental group will receive the assembly and the control group will receive no additional instruction. Then, I will have both groups complete a pre-assembly survey (1 week before the assembly takes place) and a post-assembly survey (1-week after the assembly takes place). By comparing differences in growth between the two groups, I will be able to see whether there is a statistically significant impact that is created because of the assembly.
I will be conducting this project under the guidance of Dr. Hari Nair, a licensed child and adolescent psychiatrist and an avid proponent of mental health awareness amongst youth and South Asian communities. Through this project, I hope to find an easily and readily implementable way for schools to work to counter the youth mental health crisis. This project means a lot to me, both academically (as it is my first research project) and personally, and I can’t wait to bring you guys along! Stay tuned for more blog posts, you beautiful braniacs, and I’ll catch you on the flip side.
Week 1: Blog: Senior Trip Fun + Making The Presentation
Welcome back, you Clever Charismatics!
I hope you guys have been well since the last time I saw you on week 0! Since then, a lot has happened in my life, including travelling all the way to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands with my class! The 10-day trip was some of the most fun I’ve had in my entire life, and even though we had to battle pouring rains, scorching humidity and heat, and waking up at 3 or 4 am every day, I can confidently say it was a period of time I will look back fondly on for the rest of my life.
Although the trip was fun, it did eventually come to an end. As the trip ended, coincidentally, the senior project began! Well, to be fair, the senior project began two days before the trip ended, but the little details are irrelevant. Anyways, with my short week, it was essential that I was as productive as possible, and this week, we made some really good improvements with our project so far!
This entire week was focused mostly on crafting the presentation. I first began by researching all previous school-based mental health assemblies that I could find, to identify exactly what topics were covered. The main ones I decided to include in the presentation were a broad overview of mental health, signs of mental health struggles that students can notice, some facts about mental health and its prevalence, and a short story. Along with these, I decided to include some other sections I felt were really important in my community, which were: myths vs facts about mental health, what is therapy, and what to do if I notice signs of mental health struggle in others or myself. I believed these three things were especially important within our Basis community because they are rarely ever talked about. Therapy as a whole can be seen as a taboo subject within our community, and many students also don’t really know what to do when they encounter someone else going through mental health problems. By stressing the importance of practicing active listening and checking in with your friends, I hope to make it easier for students to communicate with one another about mental health.
I also decided to make the presentation as interactive as possible, in an effort to both boost the participation rate and improve retention of subjects taught through this presentation. Specifically, the myth vs. fact section and the facts about mental health section will follow a trivia-style presentation, where students actively participate in trying to guess the right answers.
In addition to this, I also spent this past week finalizing my null hypothesis for all the things I will be testing throughout this project. In total, there are 7 unique null hypotheses I will be testing through this experiment. As I am already running out of words in this blog, I’ll explain all 7 of my null hypotheses later, when I start analyzing data, but for now, we have to look forward to logistics and planning for the experiment to actually begin! Stay tuned for most posts, you dazzling demonstrators, I’ll see you on the flip side!
Week 2: Surveys and Logistics
Welcome back, you eager entertainers!
I hope you guys have been well since the last time we saw each other last week! This past week has been much more academically focused, and while I’ve still been going through post-trip blues, I’ve also begun studying for my other time commitment during this month: My 5-week Emt training course. I’m super excited for it, but as business comes first, let's talk about my work over this past week for the senior project!
The bulk of this week was focused on creating the survey that students will answer. In total, it has 30 true or false/multiple-choice questions and 15 questions meant to assess students’ attitudes towards mental health. To create the 30 knowledge-based questions, I relied heavily on previous data discussing commonly missed points, as well as questions that were either directly or indirectly answered in the presentation. After all, as the presentation is what we are testing, I made sure that all questions had their roots in the slideshow.
The 15 attitude assessment questions were much more difficult to make. First, I had to decide on questions that covered a broad range of mental health topics while also addressing stigma from multiple angles. I eventually realized that, while it would be impossible to fully assess a student's attitude towards mental health in 15 questions, I could narrow the categories to those I felt were most important to students in middle school. These include whether students would feel comfortable working with other students with mental health issues, whether they consider other students with mental health issues dangerous, the types of treatment students would feel comfortable receiving, and whether students would feel comfortable being open about their mental health issues. By having a few friends complete the survey, I also realized that the time it takes to complete it is around 5-10 minutes, making it very feasible to complete the survey in one AE period.
The latter quarter of this week was also focused on logistics. As of right now, random selection has been completed, and parental consent forms have been sent to all participants who were randomly selected to be a part of my study. We’re still waiting for responses, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we will be able to distribute the survey next Friday. One roadblock we did hit, however, was that due to scheduling issues, our school counselor will be unable to help present the slideshow to students on Friday, March 20th, the initial date I had planned. Thus, to work around this issue, we decided to have the presentation on Friday, March 27th, instead, with these next few weeks being dedicated to both working on my paper and analyzing pre-assembly survey data.
Overall, this project has been a ton of fun so far, and I’m really excited to get some data back. A lot hinges on how this week pans out, so let’s keep our fingers crossed, and I’ll see you next time, fabulous figures. See you on the flip side!
Week 3: Literature Review and Signup Issues
Hey, you Gracious Geniuses!
Welcome back to another blog! This week was a quieter one, where not as much crazy progress was made, but welcome to our weekly recaps!
Most of this week consisted of waiting to see what the parents we sent the parental consent forms to would say. In total, we sent parental consent forms to 36 families, and unfortunately, so far, we have only received around 14 responses. However, after a meeting with my wonderful internal advisor, Teacher Jasica, today, we found a way to pivot around this low turnout.
Firstly, we decided to push back the pre-survey administration date from this week to next, in the hopes that more people will sign up between now and then. While this may seem like it would interfere with the regular flow of my project, considering that the assembly will only actually be held on March 27th, it still gives us a week between the pre-survey administration and the assembly itself.
Secondly, and all credit goes to Teacher Jasica for this idea, we realized that even if we can’t get enough signups, we can randomly recruit students to complete the surveys and have only the students whose parents signed the form serve as our experimental group. This way, the students who will have to stay back during office hours to receive the assembly will have already had the forms signed AND we will ensure that we have a large enough sample size to obtain accurate data.
I know that the situation is difficult to navigate, but honestly, I’m really excited that we were able to obtain around 11 participants already (3 of the people who responded did not permit their kids to participate). It’s a good start, and we can still keep our fingers crossed that in the next four or five days, more people decide to sign up!
In the meantime, I have also spent this week beginning work on my literature review. As I can’t do any data analysis yet, I decided to start by looking at existing studies and seeing the results they got. Most of the studies I looked at actually showed promising results, which makes me incredibly eager to conduct my own.
After reading around 20 studies, I’ve identified some major themes, including the fact that most of these mental health studies are conducted on high schoolers and, in some rare cases, eighth graders. Only a handful of studies even focused on 6th and 7th graders, which makes me super excited to see how these younger grades respond to these mental health assemblies. Another thing I noticed with these studies is that most of them are focused on full-length mental health curricula or programs spanning multiple days/weeks. These programs have an incredible amount of detail and can cover way more than we will be able to in our fifty-minute assembly. While this may seem like a bad thing, I think it’ll be helpful to see how quicker and shorter presentations affect students as well, as most schools don’t have time to implement week-long classes.
Anyways, hopefully by next week we’ll have more participants, and we’ll be ready to get the surveys out and get the project rolling. In the meantime, it’s a lot of writing and reading for me. I’ll see you next week, you hardworking heroes. See you on the flip side!
Week 4: Reading and Prepping
Welcome back, you incredible inventors!
I hope you guys have been well since we last saw each other on week 3’s blog!
I’ve put in lots of work since the last time we saw each other, and I have great news for you guys: we are finally ready to start data collection!
This week was, once again, focused primarily on the literature review and preparing for data collection. The literature review, which ended up taking the majority of my time, was actually incredibly insightful, and I’m really glad that I ended up doing the lit review before data collection. For one, I never realized how many studies there have been focused specifically on high school mental health from all around the world. From America to Tokyo and even Portugal, researchers across the world have shared an interest in the topic I’m looking into right now. On another positive note, while results varied, most of the studies I’ve looked at so far have found that these mental health programs were actually incredibly beneficial for increasing mental health literacy. Interestingly, these same studies also report that stigma and attitude towards mental health were more difficult to change, and oftentimes the changes reported were smaller than the knowledge-based changes.
Another thing I found interesting that I didn’t realize before conducting this literature review was just how many studies have been focused on youth and adolescent mental health following the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has found that the pandemic and the isolation and instability it brought on had significant impacts on youth and adolescent mental health, and it seems that psychological researchers across the world have recognized the importance of school-based mental health education, especially following lockdown. Just in the past 5 years, an incredible amount of research and data has been collected, and it’s made it so much easier for me to have guidelines by which I can conduct my own data.
Still, even though research on this topic continues to grow, middle schoolers have often been neglected in these studies, even though they are one of the most at-risk age groups for developing mental health issues. Thus, I am still incredibly excited to start collecting my own data and seeing how middle schoolers in specific respond to these topics.
The final portion of my week was focused on preparing for data collection. Unfortunately, due to Thursday being a half day and Friday being off, we were unable to conduct our pre-assembly surveys this week, but we will be able to conduct them on Monday, first thing next week. This will give us enough time to not only analyze the data from the pre-surveys, but also to prepare for the assembly presentation next week! It’s crazy to think that there's only a week left until we actually present, and so in preparation for that, this upcoming week will be mostly focused on practicing presenting and coordinating with my wonderful internal advisor, Teacher Jasica, and members of the SA team on how they want to present.
Overall, though, I’m incredibly excited to start data collection, and I look forward to seeing you jubilant joggers next week! See you on the flip side!
Week 5: We got data!!
Welcome back, you krazy kangaroos (I’m running out of adjectives),
I hope you have been well, and welcome back to week 5! It’s crazy that we are already halfway through with senior project, and I have some great news: We got data! This week, with the help of my amazing internal advisor, Teacher Jasica, we administered the pre-assembly surveys to students in both the control and experimental groups! It’s really exciting to finally have data to analyze, and I’m super excited to continue analyzing it throughout this week! However, before I could analyze the results, I had to grade the papers, and I must say, I thoroughly underestimated how much work grading papers really is. Almost two entire days were spent just grading the papers, and though I am yet to fully analyze the data, I do have some findings I can share with you guys right now!
For one, the students exhibited significantly higher levels of mental health literacy (MHL) than I expected they would. I hypothesize that this is due to an increase in exposure to mental health, either due to social media or due to more importance being placed on the topic in adolescence. While I expected the student’s average score would be around 20/30, most students have far surpassed that mark, with some even getting 28/30. The most commonly missed question so far is “Is depression a disease?”, and honestly I think it makes sense that it is the most missed question. It’s a topic that even I just recently found out about, and I’m excited to see how that question in particular changes following the administration of the assembly.
Even more surprising than the knowledge-based questions, however, are the attitude-based questions. So far, the students’ answers have been all over the place, and it’s crazy just how much variance I am seeing in how students respond. The attitude-based questions were graded on a scale from -2 to 2 (so that neutral would have no effect), and so far, upon a cursory examination, it seems like there’s barely any correlation between the scores on the knowledge section and the scores on the attitude section. I’m excited to see how, once all the data is plugged in, this changes. Hopefully, next week I’ll be finished with my data analysis and will be ready to show you guys my complete pre-assembly survey data!
In the meantime, I think it’s also important to update you guys on how the assembly itself is going. While we were initially aiming to have the assembly today (3/27), due to scheduling difficulties and Mock APs, we are unable to continue with our plan of having it today. Thus, we are looking at sometime early next week. While it is unfortunate that we can’t have it exactly when we wanted to, I view this as a blessing in disguise, as it gives us more time in between survey administration and the assembly itself. In the meantime, I’ll continue analyzing data for the rest of this week. See you on the flip side, you luscious lions.
Week 6: Assembly!
Welcome back, you mindful mathematicians!
I hope you guys have been doing well, and once again, as we had last week, I have some great updates for you guys! This week, after planning for it for the past five weeks, we had our assembly!
The assembly ended up taking place on Wednesday, April 1st, and we ended up having a total of 9 of the kids show up to the assembly. Unfortunately, two of them had to leave either during or before the assembly, so our experimental group ended up shrinking from 11 to 9 people. However, although our group shrank a bit, the assembly itself went super duper well! The kids were super receptive to the information, and we had a lot more participation than I worried we would have. All of them raised their hands to guess on the trivia we had, and I’m really glad that we decided to make the presentation as interactive as possible. One of my fondest memories of the presentation was watching the kids try to guess what percent of people in the world at one point in their life will go through a mental health disorder, and seeing their reaction to the number being a whopping 50% was incredibly enjoyable.
Something else I found interesting was that the kids said they heard of PTSD and Schizophrenia more than they did ADHD, Depression, or Anxiety. I really did not expect that to be the case, and especially considering that movies and TV shows today have placed more of a focus on these disorders. One of the students even asked me if Bipolar disorder was a mental health disorder in the middle of the presentation, which, honestly, I didn’t expect at all. Another thing I really loved seeing was how the students responded to the stigma vs fact section, as even though they got some of the answers wrong, it felt like they were truly listening to what I had to say and to the presentation as a whole.
Unfortunately, as we were so busy scrambling to figure out logistics for the assembly, we ended up forgetting to include a personal story of someone going through a mental health disorder. While I would’ve loved to see how it impacted our project, I think that, because we were already pressed for time and just about at the end of the assembly, we wouldn’t have been able to show the full video.
Lastly, just because I do think I should include this in this week's blog, our results so far have been super interesting! To be quite transparent, almost everything I thought we would see has been upturned or incorrect, so I’m super excited to see how this project progresses! It’s a lot of fun work, and now that all the tiresome logistics are over, we just have one more set of data collection and then analysis left! Overall, though, that’s it for me, you nimble nocturnals! See you on the flip side!
Week 7: Done with data collection!
Welcome back, you omnipresent omnivores!
It’s been a looooong time since we last saw each other because of spring break, but I hope you guys have been well! This week of the senior project was honestly a bit slow, as it mostly focused on just data analysis and compiling it together. However, as of today (4/17), we have officially finished collecting all the data we will be collecting for my project!
That’s right. The long-awaited and long-overdue distribution of the post-assembly surveys has been completed, and honestly, I think chronologically everything played out the best possible way. We administered the surveys the week before spring break, and while that does mean two weeks have passed since the assembly rather than one, the fact that a week of break has passed between our assembly and now means that we will be able to thoroughly test retention. Breaks are a time when students often forget what they learned (or at least I did), and seeing how well these kiddos retained the information from the mental health assembly is going to be really fun. Also, these conditions are particularly helpful in mimicking real life because students often have a lot going on in their lives, and giving a week of break in between lets us see how effective our mental health assembly truly was.
Regarding how effective the assembly was, a few changes were made to the survey itself ahead of the assembly. While the questions remained the same, I decided to add a section of the survey specifically dedicated to getting feedback from the students of the experimental group. This section includes space for them to leave any comments they have about the assembly, as well as choosing which sections were most effective and which sections they thought were unnecessary. While this system has given us some gems like “I wish it didn’t last as long”, it has been really helpful to see what the kids thought of our assembly. This not only gives me a heads up as to what changes to expect, but it also lets us know what topics are well-received and important to include in the future.
Lastly, I want to take a bit to officially talk about some of the pre-survey results I have found and how interesting they are. For one, the boys in this study actually have a significantly higher attitude score than the girls in the study. While their knowledge scores did not have a statistically significant difference, their attitude did, which was incredibly surprising. Most studies so far have found the exact opposite to be true, and to see that my study is an outlier is really cool. Furthermore, when analyzing students’ grades, I found that students in Grades 7 & 8 did not have a significant difference between their mental health literacy scores. However, both of these grades had significantly higher scores in the mental health literacy section than did sixth graders. I believe this is most likely the amount of growth children experience heading into 7th and 8th grade, especially considering the profound social and emotional changes that this age range experiences every single year.
While I do have more things to share with you guys, I’m just about to hit my word limit on this blog, so I’ll share all of it and more with you guys next week. See you on the flip side, you persistent presenters!
Week 8: We're getting there :)
Welcome back, you quiet quails!
I hope you guys have been well since we last saw each other on week 7’s blogs! As we are approaching the end of this senior project, I can finally say that so far, this project has been perfectly on track to finish in time, even through all the setbacks we faced. Even with the surveys being delayed, the assembly getting pushed back two weeks, and some students being unable to take all the surveys (which I will touch on shortly), we have pushed through and are now ready to begin work on our final products. It’s been a long 7 weeks, but honestly, I’m really proud of how far we’ve come 🙂
Anyways, this week was mostly focused on data analysis, creating graphs, and continuing work on my research paper. As some of you may remember, I already worked on the literature review and the intro to my research paper while waiting to collect data during weeks 2 and 3, and now, we’ve officially begun work on the rest of the paper. However, while this is a big step forward, the paper itself was only a small part of my work this week, as most of the week was focused on everyone's favorite data analysis!
I’ve honestly had a ton of fun analyzing the results of the pre-assembly and post-assembly surveys so far, and some of these results are genuinely surprising. One common issue I am running into, however, is that due to our small sample size, a lot of our results are insignificant. While this issue was ultimately unavoidable, as we did the best we could to recruit students given the constraints we had, it does suck knowing that maybe if we had a larger sample size, our results could be more concrete. However, while it is annoying right now, I think this is just motivating me to continue pursuing this topic in the future with larger sample sizes. Especially since this project gave me a good idea of how to conduct this sort of experiment in the future, I hope that I can someday conduct this same style of experiment on a much larger scale.
Another thing I got up to this week was creating the figures for my senior project. This included graphs of the control vs experimental group, demographic changes in score, and graphs comparing specific subgroups to one another. These figures will not only help me clearly show my data in a physical, easy-to-understand form, but also make my presentation look a bit better, and that’s always fun.
For this upcoming week, the goal is to finish around 75% of my research paper. While it may be difficult, I have already begun planning and documenting all my findings, so I think it’s a very doable goal. Especially considering I already finished the literature review, the part that usually takes me the most time, I think we’re in a good place. Overall, though, I’m really excited to continue seeing how my project develops, and I’ll see you on the flip side, you radical rabbits!
Week 9: Research Paper Done!
Welcome back, you Stupendous scholars!
I hope you guys have been marvelous since we last saw each other in week 8. It’s crazy that our time together is almost over! As we approach the end of the senior project, I definitely feel bittersweet. Even though all the work I’ve put in is starting to pay off, it still feels weird thinking about how soon I will be presenting and finishing up my project. It’s kind of surreal because it felt like just yesterday I was starting to work on this project, but through it all, I’m so incredibly glad that I got to spend these past few weeks working on my project.
This week was solely focused on the completion of my research paper. It took a lot of time to create, but overall, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. In addition to my introduction and literature review, I’ve also added a detailed methods section, a section displaying my results, a section analyzing said results, and a discussion section. In total, the paper itself ended up being around 12 pages, which is 2 more than I initially said I would create, but I think it’s well worth it :).
Now that my entire paper is finished, I can finally share with you guys some more details. For one, the assembly worked! The experimental group had a significant increase in their overall scores following the assembly, and I’m honestly really glad that that was the case. Honestly, realizing that the assembly itself was successful was one of the biggest motivation boosters I’ve had throughout the entire project, and I’m so excited for what this means in the future. At the very least, I hope this inspires BASIS schools to continue using mental health assemblies as ways of raising awareness amongst middle schoolers.
One negative thing that I did realize during this final review process, however, is that due to the small sample size, a lot of our calculations came back as not significant. This was honestly a huge blow because if we just had more time, I feel like we could’ve gotten more signups. However, at the end of the day, I’m grateful that we even got 22, and I’m so glad that I was able to run this project.
Next week will primarily focus on creating my presentation and poster board. To be completely honest, I’ve never made a research poster before, so I’m super excited to see what the process is like. From what I understand, it will involve a lot of Canva and a lot of figuring out where I can actually print the large paper, but I’ll keep you guys updated on how it goes. This week was pretty productive, so I hope next week is just as productive. See you on the flip side, you terrific translators.
Week 10: Final Projecting
Welcome back, you Universal unicorns!
I hope you guys have all been well since I saw you last week on week nine's blog! This blog might end up being a little bit shorter, but I'm proud to say that over the past week, we've done nothing but work on our final product!
Making a poster actually ended up being a lot of fun! I initially had no clue how to do it, but with the template Ms. Nagpal gave us, it became a whole lot easier. Still, I think I underestimated just how much text my lit review has, because trying to fit it all in the background section, even with bullet points, was a lot of work. In the end, it also came out looking filled to the brim with text, and while I tried to cut down on some bits, I think it still looks pretty text-heavy. Unfortunately, with the nature of my study, I don’t think there were many ways for me to avoid this issue, but overall, I’m still very pleased with how the poster turned out. I also learned a ton throughout this process, and while I think my poster is far from perfect, I think it was a pretty good first attempt, and I’m proud of it!
This week was also spent working on my presentation. As the requirements for the final presentation are 8-10 minutes, I’ve decided to really shorten down on my lit review and background sections and focus more heavily on the actual project we conducted. Only around 4 of my slides are focused on the introduction and background, and while this may seem like a handful, I think I can pretty easily knock these out in under 2 minutes. To be very honest, I think the biggest thing that I should talk about in my presentation is the future implications. As my project was limited in its sample size and significance, I think talking about how this project can guide future work to obtain more concrete data is the most important thing I can do.
Overall, I am super grateful for this senior project and for all the opportunities it’s given me. I’ve learned a lot of valuable skills throughout the duration of this project, and I think this, being my first ever form of research, is pretty cool! Thank you so much to all of you who’ve stuck around for this entire project, and thank you to both Teacher Jasica and Dr. Hari Nair, without whom this project would not have come to life. I appreciate all of you so much, and I’ll see you on the flip side, you Voracious Vegetarians!