University of Twente Student Theses
Creating a self-reflection walking route to improve student wellbeing
Lahuis, E. (2021) Creating a self-reflection walking route to improve student wellbeing.
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| Abstract: | In the past decade, there seemed to be an increased focus on students’ mental health, both in the media and in universities. A University of Twente (UT) research from 2019 concluded that a third of their student respondents showed mild symptoms of depression, anxiety, or both. Studies seem to call even more urgently for strategies to support young people’s mental health and wellbeing. This study aims to provide a solution to this decreased mental wellbeing of students. Implementing personal self-reflection could be a possible solution. Self-reflection can help students to improve their wellbeing by becoming aware of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. However, students are not yet aware of the possibilities of self-reflection or do not know how to start using it. The challenge of this study is to develop a system and to design and implement this system in a way that introduces and supports suitable proven personal self-reflection techniques to students through which they will be guided towards a perceived improvement in their wellbeing. Through ideation and specification, the focus of the project shifted to what appeared to be most important when introducing self-reflection to students: sparking the interest of students in self-reflection and subsequently retaining their motivation to keep practicing self-reflection. A solution might be the self-reflection walk: A walking route on the campus of UT that incorporates signs with QR-codes that link to self-reflection prompts on a web page. Four different types of self-reflection methods were integrated in this prototype of the self-reflection walk. 80% of the students’ interest were sparked by the system and all users expressed willingness to use the system again. The realized prototype is a great starting point for actually implementing the self-reflection walking route. The results show that the self-reflection walk succeeded in sparking the interest of students in self-reflection methods. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Subject: | 02 science and culture in general, 74 (human) geography, cartography, town and country planning, demography, 77 psychology |
| Programme: | Creative Technology BSc (50447) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/88465 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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