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What Constitutes Student Well-Being: A Scoping Review Of Students’ Perspectives

• Published: 16 November 2022
• Volume 16 , pages 447–483, ( 2023 )

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• Saira Hossain   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5549-9174 1 ,
• Sue O’Neill   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2616-4404 1 &
• Iva Strnadová   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8513-5400 1  

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Student well-being has recently emerged as a critical educational agenda due to its wide-reaching benefits for students in performing better at school and later as adults. With the emergence of student well-being as a priority area in educational policy and practice, efforts to measure and monitor student well-being have increased, and so has the number of student well-being domains proposed. Presently, a lack of consensus exists about what domains are appropriate to investigate and understand student well-being, resulting in a fragmented body of work. This paper aims to clarify the construct of student well-being by summarising and mapping different conceptualisations, approaches used to measure, and domains that entail well-being. The search of multiple databases identified 33 studies published in academic journals between 1989 and 2020. There were four approaches to conceptualising student well-being found in the reviewed studies. They were: Hedonic, eudaimonic, integrative (i.e., combining both hedonic and eudaimonic), and others. Results identified eight overarching domains of student well-being: Positive emotion, (lack of) Negative emotion, Relationships, Engagement, Accomplishment, Purpose at school, Intrapersonal/Internal factors, and Contextual/External factors. Recommendations for further research are offered, including the need for more qualitative research on student well-being as perceived and experienced by students and for research to be conducted in a non-western context.

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1 Introduction

Promoting student well-being has recently emerged as a critical educational agenda for educational systems worldwide due to its wide-reaching benefits (Joing et al., 2020 ). Student well-being can be considered an enabling condition for successful learning in school and an essential outcome of 21st-century education (Govorova et al., 2020 ). Students with a higher sense of well-being perform better at school and later on as adults by gaining employment, leading a socially engaged life, and contributing to the nation (Cárdenas et al., 2022 ; O’Brien & O’Shea, 2017 ; Price and McCallum, 2016 ). Although the importance of student well-being has been recognised unequivocally (Tobia et al., 2019 ), researchers have not reached a shared understanding of what student well-being entails. Researchers, however, all agree that it is a multidimensional concept incorporating multiple domains (Danker et al., 2019 ; Soutter et al., 2014 ; Svane et al., 2019 ).

With the emergence of student well-being as a priority area in educational policy and practice, efforts to measure and monitor student well-being have increased (Svane et al., 2019 ), along with the number of student well-being domains being proposed. Presently, a lack of consensus exists about what set of domains is appropriate to investigate and understand student well-being, resulting in a fragmented body of work (Danker et al., 2016 ; Svane et al., 2019 ). Such a lack of consensus is a significant barrier to developing, implementing, and evaluating programs to improve students’ well-being. The proliferation of proposed domains is often due to the variation in conceptualising the construct. Different conceptualisations lead to the selection of different domains.

Historically, the concept of well-being has been built upon two distinct philosophical perspectives: the hedonic and eudaimonic views. Those who favour a hedonic view conceptualise well-being as the state of feeling good and focus on cognitive and affective domains (Keyes & Annas, 2009 ). The cognitive domain represents satisfaction with school and life, whereas, the affective domain represents school-related positive (e.g., joy) and negative affect (e.g., anxiety). Proponents of the eudaimonic view often conceptualise well-being as functioning well at school and focus on a range of domains representing optimal student functioning, such as school engagement (Thorsteinsen & Vittersø, 2018 ). However, neither a hedonic nor eudaimonic view alone can comprehensively capture or assess the complex nature of student well-being (Thorsteinsen & Vittersø, 2018 ). This shortcoming might result in excluding important domains in evaluating the construct. An integrative mapping of available domains in the existing literature is needed to develop a more holistic measure of student well-being at school.

Differences in proposed domains are not entirely due to differences in underpinning theory. Domains representing similar concepts are often labelled differently in different studies, i.e., ‘relating to peers’ is labelled as ‘classroom connectedness’ by Mameli et al. ( 2018 ), whereas Lan and Moscardino ( 2019 ) labelled it as ‘peer relationship’. This variation muddies the measuring and monitoring of the construct, making it difficult to compare the results from study to study, build on the work of others, and ensure the inclusion of the domains that matter. There is a need for an integrative understanding of the domains available in the existing literature to target the most critical domains for holistic student well-being and provide effective intervention to support the domains in which students need the most support. It is also more critical than ever before, as currently, the well-being of school-aged students is grossly affected by the global pandemic COVID-19 (Dean Schwartz et al., 2021 ; Golberstein et al., 2019 ; Van Lancker & Parolin, 2020 ). Therefore, it is timely to conduct an integrative review to map the domains of student well-being to assist in measuring the construct and targeting supports and resources to bolster it.

Although past efforts have reviewed the existing literature on student well-being, their purposes have varied. Fraillon ( 2004 ) sought to identify the domains of student well-being to develop a reliable instrument for measuring the construct. Fraillon’s identified domains favoured the eudaimonic viewpoint. She operationalised student well-being as their effective student functioning in school. Later, Noble et al. ( 2008 ) focused on mapping pathways (e.g., strength-based approach) to achieving student well-being. However, it is ambitious to achieve student well-being leaving aside the question of what constitutes the construct of student well-being. Danker et al. ( 2016 ) reviewed the existing literature to locate domains specifically relevant to the well-being of students with autism. More recently, Govender et al. ( 2019 ) did a systematic review on South African young people’s well-being, but their review focused on well-being in a general life context. None of the above studies sought to review the domains or indicators of student well-being, mainly focusing on the school context and exploring students’ perspectives. The limit in the scope of the previous reviews indicates the gap for an integrative review to map the body of evidence on domains of student well-being. This review aims to map students’ perspectives regarding the domains of student well-being available in the existing literature to provide an integrative understanding of the construct. The following research questions guide the study:

How has student well-being been conceptualised in previous studies?

What approaches have been taken to measure student well-being?

What domains of student well-being have been perceived by the students in previous studies?

This study follows a scoping review methodology allowing for a broader and more exploratory approach to mapping a topic of interest (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005 ; Levac et al., 2010 ). We chose a scoping review as it is suitable for identifying factors related to a concept (Munn et al., 2018). This review is informed by the methodological framework developed by Arksey & O’Malley ( 2005 ), which adds methodological rigour to systematic reviews. It follows a step-by-step, rigorous, transparent, and replicable procedure for searching and summarising the literature to ensure the reliability of the findings (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005 ; Levac et al., 2010 ).

This scoping review included the following stages: (a) identifying relevant studies through a search strategy; (b) selecting the studies that meet inclusion criteria; (c) assessing the quality of data; and (d) charting the data, summarising, and reporting the results. Scoping reviews do not necessarily involve data quality assessment, but we carried out this step to ensure the quality of research evidence included in the domain mapping.

2.1 Identifying Relevant Studies

Given the broader aim and coverage of a scoping review, a comprehensive approach was required to locate the relevant studies, to answer the research questions. The search involved three key sources: electronic databases, hand-searching key journals in the field, and ancestral searches of relevant article reference lists. For manageability reasons, the scoping review did not include grey literature and restricted the search to articles written in English. The identification of relevant studies is not linear but an iterative process. Hence, we adopted a reflexive, flexible, and broad approach to defining, redefining, changing, and adding search terms to generate comprehensive coverage. The initial search terms and relevant electronic databases were identified through consultations between the first author and a research librarian at the authors’ institution. The search strategy and results were informed by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (Moher et al., 2009 ).

A keyword search was conducted using five electronic databases: ProQuest, PsycINFO, Scopus, Taylor & Francis Online, and Web of Science. Boolean operators were used to conducting the searches (see Table 1 for search terms). All the database searches were limited to English-language peer-reviewed articles, with abstracts published from November 1989—2020. The start date represents the enactment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations [UN], 1989 ) when the concept of children’s well-being gained increasing international attention.

A hand search was conducted of eight journals from our database search that commonly publish research on student well-being at school to locate potentially relevant articles missed in the database search (Levac et al., 2010 ). The eight journals included: Child Indicators Research, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Journal of Happiness Studies, School Mental Health, School Psychology Review , and School Psychology Quarterly. As a final step for locating relevant studies, a backward and forward citation search was conducted with the publications identified from the database and a hand search for full-text assessment (Briscoe et al., 2020 ; Wright et al., 2014 ).

2.2 Selecting the Studies

The initial literature search yielded a total of 1,205 articles for further screening. A total of 410 duplicate articles were removed (see Fig.  1 ). The authors devised inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure that only articles relevant to the aim of the scoping review were selected (see Table 2 ). The titles and abstracts of the 795 novel articles were screened against the inclusion and exclusion criteria independently by the first and second authors, resulting in 45 articles retained for full-text screening. The full text of the 45 articles was examined against the inclusion criteria independently by the first and second authors to assess eligibility resulting in the exclusion of 22 of them.

Flow Diagram of Search Results

As a final step, the authors subjugated the 23 retained articles for backward and forward citation searching independently by the first and second authors yielding another ten relevant articles resulting in 33 papers included in the data charting and extraction stage. Cohen’s kappa coefficient (κ) with 95% confidence intervals was calculated to determine the interrater reliability score for screening stages: κ = 0.82 for the first stage, 0.85 for the second stage, and 0.89 for the third stage, which can be interpreted as almost perfect agreement (McHugh, 2012 ). The third author resolved any disagreement between the first and second authors.

2.3 Assessing the Quality of the Data

We assessed the quality of the included articles using the Standard Quality Assessment Criteria for Evaluating Primary Research Papers from a Variety of Fields (Kmet et al., 2004 ). Kmet et al. ( 2004 ) proposed two checklists: one for quantitative and the other for qualitative studies. Example assessment criteria for the quantitative studies included: the study objectives/research questions, justification and detail reported in the study design, and analytic methods. Example assessment criteria for the qualitative studies included connection to a theoretical framework/wider body of knowledge, clear description and systematic data collection and analysis method, credibility, and reflexivity of the account.

All 33 articles were independently scored by the first and second authors based on three criteria — whether they met the tool’s assessment criteria, met them only partially, or not at all. The yielded scores for each criterion were summated and converted into percentages to allow comparison. The quality scores ranged from 77—100%, which can be interpreted as strong according to McGarty and Melville ( 2018 ), indicating a high quality of research evidence. The inter-rater reliability of this process was high at κ = 0.92 (Cohen, 1960 ; McHugh, 2012 ). The third author resolved any disagreement.

2.4 Charting Data, Summarising, and Reporting Results

This step involves extracting the information relevant to the scoping review from the selected articles. A structure template was used to extract information as follows: author details, year of publication, characteristics of the sample (size, age, and gender ), study location, research design, measure/ data collection instrument and domains or indicators of well-being (Levac et al., 2010 ). The first and second authors coded the studies independently with a high level of agreement (κ = 0.89) (Cohen, 1960 ; McHugh, 2012 ).

3.1 Overview of the Selected Studies

About 58,910 students participated in the studies, ranging from 16 to 10,913. Most of the student participants were from regular primary or secondary schools. However, participants in two studies, Mameli et al. ( 2018 ) and Van Petegem et al. ( 2008 ), were from technical or vocational secondary schools. The age of the participants ranged from 6 to 19 years. Most ( n  = 16) of the studies focused on post-primary grade levels, with half including participants from middle school levels. In contrast, only two studies, one from China (Lan & Moscardino, 2019 ) and the other from Ireland (Miller et al., 2013 ), included participants only from primary grade levels. Five of the studies had participants from both primary and secondary grade levels. About one-third of the studies ( n  = 10) did not report any information regarding participating students’ grade levels. The number of female and male student participants was reported in 16 studies, with 53.48% being female (see Table 3 ). One study focused on students with autism enrolled in regular schools (Danker et al., 2019 ). Two studies were multi-perspective, including students, parents, principals, and teachers (Anderson & Graham, 2016 ; Tobia et al., 2019 ).

European countries dominated the research location from the 33 studies included in the analysis, accounting for 18 out of the 33 studies (see Table 3 ). There were eight studies from China and three from Australia. Three studies were multi-country: Opre et al. ( 2018 ), Hascher ( 2007 ), and Donat et al. ( 2016 ). The dates of the studies ranged from 2004 to 2020, with 26 studies published since 2015. More than two-thirds were published within the last five years, indicating growing student well-being research popularity.

3.2 Approaches to Assessing Student Well-Being

The approaches to measuring student well-being in the reviewed studies were quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Quantitative research methods dominated the research in this review, with 27 of the 33 studies solely using this method. In 30 of the 33 studies, self-reported survey measures were used, using cross-sectional and longitudinal designs (see Table 3 ). Three studies followed a qualitative, and one study followed a mixed-methods approach. Hascher ( 2007 ) and López-Pérez and Fernández-Castilla ( 2018 ) used quantitative and qualitative data collection but did not explicitly follow a mixed-methods study design.

Most of the quantitative measurement instruments used in the articles reviewed here were multidimensional, with sub-scales consisting of multiple items derived from one or more existing well-being scales. For example, McLellan and Steward ( 2015 ) adapted items from the European Social Survey (Huppert et al., 2009 ) for use with young people in school settings and drawing on Every Child Matters (Department for Education & Skills, 2003 ) from the UK. Few studies used multidimensional instruments that developed scales dedicated explicitly to measuring student well-being at school instead of adapting general well-being scales within the school context (e.g., Anderson & Graham, 2016 ; Engels et al., 2004 ; Hascher, 2007 ; Tian, 2008 ). Only López-Pérez and Fernández-Castilla ( 2018 ) and Wong and Siu ( 2017 ) used single items to measure school happiness.

Most instruments were developed from an adult perspective, that of the researchers. However, students were consulted in four studies before creating the scale items. Anderson and Graham ( 2016 ) set up a well-being advisory group of students, teachers, and other stakeholders to elicit their conceptualisations of well-being and their conception of an imaginary school. Opre et al. ( 2018 ) conducted separate focus group interviews with adolescents, parents, and teachers to identify and operationalise the sub-components of student well-being. Engels et al. ( 2004 ) used panel discussions with secondary students to identify the aspects of school and classrooms as learning environments that students perceived were relevant to their well-being. Kern et al. ( 2015 ) asked students and pastoral staff about what they wanted to know about their well-being as an indicator of what was essential for student well-being. Feedback on the suitability of items from students and teachers was sought by McLellan and Steward ( 2015 ) after they derived items from policy and other scales. Seeking stakeholder feedback enhances the content validity of instruments (Stalmeijer et al., 2008 ).

Most instruments reviewed here had acceptable reliability and good model fit. About 24 of the 30 self-report instruments had reliability ranging from Cronbach’s alpha α = 0.70 to 0.95: an acceptable value for scale reliability (Hair et al., 2018). Most studies used factor analysis to determine the factor structure of student well-being instruments, with two exceptions. Mameli et al. ( 2018 ) and Tong et al. ( 2018 ) developed sub-scales to measure student well-being indicators derived from operationalising the construct.

In the three qualitative studies, stakeholder inputs provided a deeper insight into student well-being. Soutter ( 2011 ) used drawing, walk-about discussion, and small-group work to elicit students’ understanding of well-being at school. She also developed a conceptual framework comprising domains of student well-being based on a thorough transdisciplinary literature review on well-being which she used to analyse and interpret data in her study. Hidayah et al. ( 2016 ) conducted focus group discussions using unstructured and open-ended questions with 42 secondary students in Indonesia following the School Well-being Model developed by Konu and Lintonen ( 2006 ). Danker et al. ( 2019 ) adopted an advisory participatory research method and a grounded theory approach. They used semi-structured interviews and photovoice to gain insight into well-being experiences, barriers, and facilitators of well-being for students with autism.

3.3 The Conceptualisation of Student Well-Being

There were four approaches to conceptualising student well-being found in the reviewed studies. They were hedonic, eudaimonic, integrative (i.e., combining both hedonic and eudaimonic), and other (see Table 4 ). All the reviewed studies, irrespective of their conceptualisation approach, represented well-being in terms of different indicators: those aspects needed to ensure a good level of student well-being.

A hedonic view was evident in 16 of the 33 studies (See Table 4 ). These studies mainly adopted Diener’s ( 1984 ) theory of subjective well-being within the domain-specific context of school (e.g., Liu et al., 2016 ). Hedonic-aligned definitions tended to be relatively homogeneous, with researchers defining student well-being as the subjective, cognitive, positive appraisal of school life that emerges from the presence of positive feelings such as happiness and the absence of negative feelings such as worry. Both the cognitive (e.g., school satisfaction) and affective components (e.g., joy) were evident. The connotation of positive feelings about school was common, with some defining positive feelings as the harmony between student characteristics and the characteristics of the school (e.g., Engels et al., 2004 ).

Three studies reflected eudaimonic views and conceptualised student well-being as functioning effectively within the school context (See Table 4 ). There was greater variation in how the concept was defined, with effective functioning represented as school connectedness, engagement, educational purpose, and academic efficacy (Arslan & Renshaw, 2018 ). The reviewed studies using eudaimonic aligned definition mainly followed Ryff ( 1989 )’s Psychological well-being theory which conceptualises well-being as a psychological phenomenon comprising six dimensions: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. However, none of the reviewed studies included all the six dimensions of eudaimonic well-being. For example, Holfve-Sabel ( 2014 ) focuses on learning and positive relationships.

Eleven studies took an integrative approach. They combined hedonic and eudaimonic views to conceptualise student well-being (See Table 4 ). Most of these studies provided an ad hoc definition of student well-being based on different indicators, including hedonic and eudaimonic aspects. For instance, Mameli et al.( 2018 ) represented student well-being in terms of emotional attitude (e.g. emotional engagement) and social relationship (e.g., school connectedness) indicators. Whereas, Kern et al. ( 2015 ) took a more holistic viewpoint and adopted Seligman’s PERMA theory of human flourishing within the school context, including five indicators such as positive emotion (P), engagement (E), relationships (R), meaning (M), and achievement (A). Three studies fell under the other category. Two of them took the need satisfaction approach and viewed well-being as a state that results from the satisfaction of three needs: having, loving, and being, as suggested by Allardt ( 2003 ). Here, having referred to material and impersonal needs, it also included the need for good health, loving refers to the need to relate to others, and denoting the need for personal growth. Konu et al.’s ( 2015 ) quantitative study in Finland and Hidayah et al.’s ( 2016 ) qualitative study conceptualised well-being in terms of four indicators reflecting the three needs (see Table 4 ). Only one study by Anderson and Graham ( 2016 ) used recognition theory to conceptualise student well-being in terms of three aspects of recognition: cared for, respected and valued.

3.4 Domains of Student Well-Being Explored in Previous Studies

Irrespective of the theoretical perspective adopted, 29 of the 33 studies used instruments with subscales to measure student well-being as a multidimensional concept. Ninety-one domains of well-being were identified from the well-being instruments, with an additional 21 extracted from the qualitative studies, resulting in a total of 112. We observed that different terms were used in the 33 studies reviewed to refer to the domains identified, although their descriptions were often similar. Hence, a coding scheme was developed to recategorise the domains extracted from the 33 studies (see Table 5 ). By analysing the items under each domain and examining their qualitative descriptions, all 112 domains were coded independently by the first and second author and recategorised into eight overarching domains following the coding scheme. Good interrater reliability of Cohens κ = 0.97 (Cohen, 1960 ; McHugh, 2012 ) was also found at this stage.

The eight derived overarching domains included positive emotion, lack of negative emotion, relationships, engagement, accomplishment, a sense of purpose in school, intrapersonal/ internal factors, and contextual/ external factors. The number of domains included per study ranged between two and eight.

3.4.1 Positive Emotions

Positive emotion is about feeling good at school and reflects a hedonic view of well-being. About two-thirds of the studies (24/33) in this review included at least one domain of positive emotion, such as joy or school satisfaction (see Table 6 ). School satisfaction was the most measured aspect of positive emotion, regardless of how it was labelled.

3.4.2 (lack of) Negative Emotions

The absence of negative emotions such as stress, worry, anxiety, or cynicism was used as a proxy for well-being and was evident in 16 of the 33 studies (see Table 6 ). It was commonly measured alongside positive emotion, except in two studies. Scrimin et al. ( 2016 ) assessed school-related anxiety and academic stress. Tong et al. ( 2018 ) measured depressive symptoms and student stress using specific subscales for academic stress, efficacy stress, and self-focused stress.

3.4.3 Relationships

This domain refers to students’ perceptions and feelings about meaningful relationships with peers, teachers, family and the school as an institution/community. It was the most dominant and was evident in 26 of the 33 studies (see Table 6 ). Under this domain, we included school connectedness, teacher-student, and peer-peer relationships (see Table 5 for coding sceme). The majority included positive relationships either with teachers or peers. Soutter ( 2011 ) viewed the relationship domain not only as relating to family-peers-teachers-school but also to the purpose of one’s life.

3.4.4 Engagement

This domain included behavioural, cognitive, and affective involvement with the school and was evident in 14 out of 33 studies (see Table 6 ). Cognitive and emotional engagement, interest in learning tasks, looking after self and others, attitude towards homework, and means of self-fulfilment were included here as they referred to students’ involvement in curricular and extra-curricular activities at school. We had academic well-being in the engagement domain from the study by Danker et al. ( 2019 ), referring to students’ qualitative accounts of learning in their favourite subjects at school, doing homework, and how they learn best.

3.4.5 Accomplishment

This domain referred to students’ perceived academic self-concept. Twelve of the 33 studies included a sense of accomplishment. Again, this domain was viewed in many ways, such as academic efficacy/competence, positive academic self-concept, and self-assessment of completing the task. Butler and Kern ( 2016 ) saw it as “working toward and reaching goals, mastery and efficacy to complete tasks” (p. 4). We noted a lack of domains that included non-academic accomplishments such as a sport or the arts.

3.4.6 Purpose at School

This domain represented students’ belief about the purpose or value of schoolwork to their present or future life and was evident in 4 of the 33 studies. This domain was referred to in diverse terms in the studies reviewed, including educational purposes, learning, personal development, striving, and well-being (see Table 5 for the coding scheme).

3.4.7 Intrapersonal/Internal Factors

About 10 of the 33 studies included this domain (see Table 6 ). This overarching domain is concerned with those aspects that manifest students’ internalised sense of self, such as emotional regulation, that help them experience well-being at school (Fraillon, 2004 ). Self-esteem (Miller et al., 2013 ) and self-efficacy (Tobia et al., 2019 ) were also coded as intrapersonal, as were opportunities to make an autonomous decision (Mascia et al., 2020 ) as items referred to students’ sense of self-regulation at school. Among the qualitative findings, Soutter’s ( 2011 ) “being” domain was categorised as intrapersonal as it represents personal agency, identity, independence, and the way one is comfortable with or wants to be .

Included in this overarching domain were mental and physical health as they are related to intrapersonal. Physical health was found in four studies, such as the absence of physical complaints (Hascher, 2007 ; Morinaj & Hascher, 2019 ), Health status (Hidayah et al., 2016 ; Konu et al., 2015 ), and Being healthy (Anderson & Graham, 2016 ) (See Table 6 ). Only two studies referred to students’ mental health. Wong and Siu ( 2017 ) and Kern et al. ( 2015 ) assessed the absence of depressive symptoms and depression as indicators of student well-being, respectively.

3.4.8 Contextual/ External Factors

This domain was included in 6 of the 33 studies (see Table 6 ). External factors cover all domains representing resources inside and outside of the school available for students to support their well-being. It includes but is not limited to physical and material resources, tools, and opportunities. From analysing the instruments used, the following external resources were used to measure student well-being: school conditions (Hidayah et al., 2016 ; Konu et al., 2015 ), current living conditions, and availability of assistance (Mascia et al., 2020 ). Similarly, the Having domain from Soutter’s ( 2011 ) qualitative study referred to getting access to opportunities, tools, and resources, with Anderson and Graham ( 2016 ) reporting that having a great environment, having a say, and having privacy indicated student well-being at school. It included physical and material resources, tools, school conditions or environment, current living conditions, and availability of assistance (see Table 5 for the coding scheme). Soutter’s ( 2011 ) Having domain was included here as it referred to access to opportunity, tools, and resources.

4 Discussion

4.1 measuring student well-being.

All but three studies in our review took a quantitative approach and used self-report surveys to measure student well-being. The majority of the measurement instruments had acceptable to good reliability scores. However, depending on what domains the instrument items reflect, they may not have holistically captured the construct of student well-being at school. Further, a few measurement instruments (e.g., SWBQ by Hascher, 2007 ) were used and validated in more than one study or geographic location, which raises validity and generalisation issues.

Few studies in this review reported a systematic approach to developing, validating, and piloting their instruments, optimising psychometric properties. The scales of Renshaw ( 2015 ) and Opre et al. ( 2018 ) are exceptions. Further, few sought inputs from the population of interest; the students. Adapting existing measurement instruments designed to measure adults’ or children’s well-being in general for the school context was common and less onerous than developing and testing a new instrument (Boateng et al., 2018 ). School, however, is a unique context, and general measures of well-being might not capture the nuances of well-being for students at school (Joing et al., 2020 ).

The reviewed studies seldom used qualitative and Mixed methods approaches despite the richness of data on participants’ perspectives and experiences from such research designs (Aarons et al., 2012 ; Creswell, 2013 ). This finding is consistent with the literature review undertaken by Danker et al. ( 2016 ). In this review, Three studies investigated student well-being via qualitative means (Danker et al., 2019 ; Hidayah et al., 2016 ; Soutter, 2011 ). More qualitative studies are needed to understand the students’ perspectives better. Further, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches is an effective way to improve the construct validity of research instruments, as Anderson and Graham ( 2016 ) did.

4.2 Conceptualising Student Well-Being

We identified significant variability in the conceptualisation of the term student well-being. Studies focused on measuring student well-being rather than conceptualising or defining the construct. Despite no unanimously accepted definition, all researchers conceptualised it as a multidimensional and context-dependent construct. Positive emotion and feeling (e.g., joy) in the school environment seemed to be the core element shared by all definitions, reflecting a hedonist view of well-being. Although explicit to different degrees, another common element in the conceptualisations reviewed was students’ subjective perceptions, appraisal, and evaluation of their school experience. Some conceptualisations reflected the eudaimonic view and included students’ realisation of their potential and effective functioning, typically academic learning in the classroom and within the social community. In considering the common elements across the identified definitions in the studies reviewed here, we propose a more holistic definition of student well-being as the subjective appraisal of a student’s school experience emerging from but is not limited to, positive over negative emotions, the satisfaction of individual needs, effective academic, social, and psychological functioning at school to pursue valued goals, and having access to internal and external factors.

4.3 Domains of Student Well-Being

The eight overarching domains we identified are consistent with findings reported in reviews by Fraillon ( 2004 ) and Danker et al. ( 2016 ). Fraillon ( 2004 ) identified the intrapersonal and relationship domain, whereas positive emotion, lack of negative emotion, engagement, accomplishment, relationships, intrapersonal, and having access to external resources were found in Danker et al.’s ( 2016 ) review. This review identified one additional domain: a sense of purpose at school.

Among the eight domains, hedonic-aligned domains were the most common. The consistency of the hedonic conceptualisation and measurement instruments is perhaps the reason behind such hedonic domination. Commonly included domains were positive relationship and engagement, which overlap with well-researched concepts such as peer relationships, school belonging, school connectedness, and engagement at school. Peer relationships and school engagement have been well assessed, with many psychometrically sound measures developed. Therefore, it is not surprising that researchers tended to include those domains.

Conversely, less frequently included domains such as a sense of purpose at school and intrapersonal may be due to the lack of conceptual clarity and availability of current measurement instruments. Several studies included a sense of accomplishment of the other eudaimonic domains. However, the notion of accomplishment in the reviewed studies was academic performance-centric, potentially excluding non-academic accomplishments at school (e.g., sports, the arts), which are crucial for holistic development. Recent studies have started to include eudaimonic domains such as a sense of purpose and intrapersonal domains that add depth to the construct of student well-being.

Although some domains were more frequent than others, they should not be assumed to be more critical or pertinent. Using a domain due to its conceptual clarity and measurement suitability is problematic as it can narrow the scope of an inherently complex multidimensional construct like student well-being. Our review found that many studies lacked comprehensiveness regarding the domains. In 13 of the 33 studies, only two or three domains of student well-being were used to describe the whole construct. Another problem in the studies reviewed was the lack of clear reasoning behind choosing a specific domain. There might be some good reasons to have fewer domains; it is crucial to outline the reason for the selection clearly. Doing so can provide a more theoretically grounded, accurate and informative assessment of student well-being.

5 Recommendations

We offer three recommendations to researchers based on our findings. First, there is a lack of systematic development of psychometrically sound instruments for measuring student well-being. Hence, our first recommendation is that researchers develop (or adapt) valid and reliable tools explicitly to measure student well-being that follows the nine steps outlined by Boateng et al. ( 2018 ), reflecting a broader conceptualisation of student well-being discerned in this review. Further, validation of student well-being measurement instruments that are conceptually more holistic with culturally, socially, and economically diverse participants is needed to advance the field.

Second, the domains we identified in our review may provide a valuable basis for assessing students’ well-being experience at school. The theoretical and practical relevance of the domains identified in our review should be investigated in future research. For instance, researchers may examine the construct validity of these domains collectively and see the possibility of developing a psychometrically sound instrument including them. Further, these domains can serve as a guideline for designing intervention programs that facilitate student well-being at school. Future research can investigate the impact of these domains on outcomes relevant to student well-being.

Third, we identified a predominance of quantitative studies. This points to a lack of students’ qualitative accounts of their understanding of well-being at school. Qualitative accounts can also inform the quantitative findings. Hence, our third recommendation is that more research should be conducted using qualitative and mixed-method approaches.

Fourth, most research has been conducted in Western cultural contexts, with a few exceptions, such as China and India. Given that well-being is a culture-specific construct (Suh & Choi, 2018), students’ well-being experiences might be influenced by their local educational system and broader socio-cultural factors such as adult–child relationships. Thus, our final recommendation is that more qualitative and quantitative research should be conducted in non-Western cultural contexts, particularly in countries from the global South. Cross-cultural comparisons that assist in identifying universal and culture-specific domains of student well-being are warranted.

6 Limitations

This scoping review has three main limitations. Firstly, we included only peer-reviewed journal articles in English, which raises the possibility of excluding potentially relevant studies published in reports or other languages. Secondly, we only included studies that explicitly investigated students’ perspectives. Other stakeholder views, such as teachers and parents, are important to gain a complete picture of student well-being. Some studies included in this review had other stakeholder views but were not focused upon. Hence, the scope of this review in terms of providing a multi-perspective understanding of the construct is somewhat limited. Thirdly, the dominance of cross-sectional design in the studies reviewed limits the test for causalities. Finally, since most of the studies in this scoping review reflected Anglo-European student populations, caution is needed to generalise the findings to other cultures and contexts.

7 Conclusion

This review presented an overview of the conceptualisation, measurement, and domain of student well-being identified in the extant literature since 1989. We found that definitions and conceptualisation of the construct of student well-being varied. Researchers named domains found in previous studies with different labels, unnecessarily muddying the construct and leading to issues when comparing research findings. Our analysis showed that most domains reflected a hedonic view leading to a narrow line of enquiry, with some domains we identified here appearing under-researched. Based on our review of definitions and conceptualisations, we offered a more holistic explanation of student well-being to incorporate dominant and diverse views. We identified eight overarching domains from the 33 studies. We believe this is a significant advancement, bringing better clarity and demarcation of the construct. We believe the eight domains identified here encompass a wide range of school-based experiences and provide a more holistic conceptualisation of the construct of student well-being.

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Hossain, S., O’Neill, S. & Strnadová, I. What Constitutes Student Well-Being: A Scoping Review Of Students’ Perspectives. Child Ind Res 16 , 447–483 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-022-09990-w

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Accepted : 21 October 2022

Published : 16 November 2022

Issue Date : April 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-022-09990-w

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Definition of student

Examples of student in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'student.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English, from Latin student-, studens , from present participle of studēre to study — more at study

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing student

• anti - student
• college / student deferment
• day student
• exchange student
• mature student
• nontraditional student
• student body
• student council
• student driver
• student government
• student lamp
• student loan
• student's t distribution
• student teacher
• student teaching
• student union

Dictionary Entries Near student

stud driver

student's t distribution

Cite this Entry

“Student.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/student. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of student, more from merriam-webster on student.

Nglish: Translation of student for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of student for Arabic Speakers

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[ stood -nt , styood - ]

a student at Yale.

a student of human nature.

/ ˈstjuːdənt /

• a person following a course of study, as in a school, college, university, etc

student teacher

• a person who makes a thorough study of a subject

Discover More

Pronunciation note, other words from.

• student·less adjective
• student·like adjective
• anti·student noun adjective
• non·student noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of student 1

Compare Meanings

How does student compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:

• teacher vs. student

Synonym Study

Example sentences.

The university’s announcement comes as the school celebrates its bicentennial and days after students marched to LeBlanc’s on-campus residence and demanded the closure of the Regulatory Studies Center, the GW Hatchet reported.

Schools that have high numbers of students of color suffer chronic underfunding and less support across the country.

School systems are reporting alarming numbers of students falling behind.

The deal sets the stage for prekindergarten and special-education students to return to school buildings on Thursday.

His family repeatedly sought records from the small local police department on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, desperate to understand the final minutes the 19-year-old college student spent alive.

According to the USDA, student participation began to fall, with 1.4 million students opting out of the lunch program entirely.

Abraham, a yellow cab driver and student, feels that blacks are targeted unfairly by the police.

This was also the year Duke University student Belle Knox put college girls on the map.

HONG KONG—Last year, I met a Chinese graduate student on a tour of the northeastern United States before his first day at Harvard.

The congressman traces his belief in Santa Claus back 40 years, when he was a student going to college “on the GI Bill.”

It was one day when a student from the Stuttgardt conservatory attempted to play the Sonata Appassionata.

The student who does not intend to arouse himself need hope for no keen sense of beauty.

A pupil of her father until his death, when she became a student under Gabriel Max, in Munich, for a year.

One of them had taken four years of theology, and is an excellent student, and not so fitting for other things.

A story or narrative is invented for the purpose of helping the student, as it is claimed, to memorise it.

Related Words

• undergraduate

More About Student

Where does  student come from.

The word student entered English around 1350–1400. It ultimately derives from the Latin studēre . The meaning of this verb is one we think will resonate with a lot of actual students out there: “to take pains.” No, we’re not making this up: a student , etymologically speaking, can be understood a “pains-taker”!

In Latin, studēre had many other senses, though, and ones that some students may have a harder time relating to. Studēre could also mean “to desire, be eager for, be enthusiastic about, busy oneself with, apply oneself to, be diligent, pursue, study.” The underlying idea of student , then, is about striving—for new knowledge and abilities. It’s about that mix of hard work and passion. Isn’t that inspirational?

We don’t think you have to be a student of etymology to make the connection between student and study . Like student , the verb study also comes from the Latin studēre . The noun study —as in The scientists conducted a sleep study or Her favorite room of her house is the study —is also related to studēre and is more immediately derived from the Latin noun studium , meaning “zeal, inclination,” among other senses.

But not all connections between words are so obvious. Consider student and tweezers . Would you have guessed this unlikely pair of words share a common root? Let’s, um, pick this apart.

Tweezers are small pincers or nippers for plucking our hairs, extracting splinters, picking up small objects, and so forth. The word entered English in the mid-1600s, based on tweeze , an obsolete noun meaning “case of surgical instruments,” which contained what we now call tweezers .

Losing its initial E along the way, tweeze comes from etweese , which is an English rendering of the French etui , a type of small case used to hold needles, cosmetic instruments, and the like. Etui can ultimately be traced back to the Latin stūdiāre , “to treat with care,” related to the same studēre . This is how student is related to, of all things, tweezers .

Did you know ... ?

For further study, explore the following words that share a root with student : 

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of student in English

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• The railcard allows students and young people to travel half-price on most trains .
• We try to treat our students as individuals .
• The course is intended for intermediate-level students.
• I prefer teaching methods that actively involve students in learning .
• I've got two bright students, but the rest are average .
• homeschooler
• house officer
• school-leaver
• schoolchild

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

student | American Dictionary

Student | business english, examples of student, collocations with student.

These are words often used in combination with student .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of student

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of or relating to birds

Dead ringers and peas in pods (Talking about similarities, Part 2)

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Scrutinizing the Standards: A Literature Review of the Advantages and Disadvantages of Standardized Testing

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Main Article Content

For schoolchildren in the twenty-first century, the weeks of standardized testing each year mean more than just hours of tedium and boredom; for some, they mean the difference between moving to the next grade with their peers or being held back, or whether they get placed in a gifted or ESL class. Those at the front of the room are not free from the scrutiny either as the assessment of teachers’ job performance has become more reliant on the testing results of their students, and schools are even shut down when students are consistently poor performers. As the pressure surrounding these tests has risen, so has the research exploring whether this is a beneficial change for education. Jennings and Lauen (2016), Kaufman et al. (2015), Toldson and McGee (2014), Laurito et al. (2019), and Jacob and Rothstein (2016) all explore this same topic from different perspectives with their research. In the literature, though the perspectives of the articles differ, similarities emerge regarding the issue of achievement gaps in testing, the dangers of tests being so high stakes for students and educators, and the importance of informing professionals in academia regarding how to best interpret test scores.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

• Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution License  that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.  
• Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See  The Effect of Open Access ).
• Student authors waive FERPA rights for only the publication of the author submitted works. Specifically: Students of Indiana University East voluntarily agree to submit their own works to The Journal of Student Research at Indiana University East , with full understanding of FERPA rights and in recognition that for this one, specific instance they understand that  The Journal of Student Research at Indiana University East is Public and Open Access. Additionally, the Journal is viewable via the Internet and searchable via Indiana University, Google, and Google-Scholar search engines.

Jacob, B., & Rothstein, J. (2016). The measurement of student ability in modern assessment systems. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(3), 85–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43855702

Jennings, Jennifer L. & Lauen, Douglas L. (2016). Accountability, inequality, and achievement: The effects of the no child left behind act on multiple measures of student learning. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2(5), 220–241. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2016.2.5.11

Kaufman, J., Hamilton, L., Stecher, B., Naftel, S., Robbins, M., Garber, C., Ogletree, C., Faxon-Mills, S., & Opfer, D. (2015). What are teachersʹ and school leadersʹ major concerns about new K–12 state tests?: Findings from the American Teacher and American School Leader Panels. In What Are Teachers’ and School Leaders’ Major Concerns About New K–12 State Tests?: Findings from the American Teacher and American School Leader Panels, 1–8. RAND Corporation. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt19w72c7.1

Laurito, A., Lacoe, J., Schwartz, A. E., Sharkey, P., & Ellen, I. G. (2019). School climate and the impact of neighborhood crime on test scores. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 5(2), 141–166. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2019.5.2.08

Toldson, Ivory A. & McGee, Tyne. (2014). What the ACT and SAT mean for Black students’ higher education prospects (Editor’s Commentary). The Journal of Negro Education, 83(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.83.1.0001

Research expo highlights student and faculty creativity

Friday, Apr 26, 2024 • Katherine Egan Bennett : contact

Hundreds of faculty, students and business leaders flocked to The University of Texas at Arlington for its second annual Research and Innovation Expo, an event designed to showcase the University’s research efforts.

“This is an event where we can showcase our research achievements and encourage everyone to learn about and engage with other investigators outside their own fields,” said Eileen Clements, interim executive director of the UT Arlington Research Institute and an organizer of the event.

Researchers learned how to find external funding for their projects from such varied sources as federally funded government organizations like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, private foundations, or industry leaders who need technology solutions to advance their companies.

“This expo was a way for researchers who have been successful in securing extramural funding to offer advice to others,” said Jeff Campbell, director of the Shimadzu Institute for Research Technology at UTA and an event organizer. “We put together a cross-section of faculty from around campus to share their success stories and offer tips for future collaborations.”

UT Arlington President Jennifer Cowley and Paul Corson, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology Development , recognized the many researchers who had their inventions patented in 2023 .

“It’s all about the mindset,” Corson said. “Anyone on campus has it within them to embrace their entrepreneurial aspirations and get engaged, whether it’s an artist who is going out for their first gig or someone curing cancer.”

In addition to showcasing the talented faculty on campus in Arlington, the expo also featured business and entrepreneurial leaders from the community who offered their wisdom and words of motivation to the next generation of leaders.

“We need to be able to stay ahead of the curve by utilizing technology and innovation,” said attendee and speaker Troy Alley Jr., chief operating officer and president of real estate at Con-Real LP, the largest Black-owned construction and real estate company of its kind in the southern United States. “This is what helps you stay competitive.”

The expo was a platform for top private-sector, philanthropic and academic leaders from across the county to share lessons learned from their entrepreneurial experiences and advise UTA faculty. Additional guest speakers included:

• Kirk Ririe, co-founder of Idaho Technology
• Azad Madni, professor at the University of Southern California, member of the National Academy of Engineering and recipient of the Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education
• Thom Ruhe, president and CEO of NC IDEA

Just how close are MIT and other universities to Israel? Protesting students want schools to cut research ties.

Two years ago, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended a research partnership in Russia after the country’s invasion of Ukraine, he said, provoked “terrible consequences” for civilians.

Now MIT students who are protesting Israel’s war in Gaza are demanding that MIT respond similarly by severing ties with Israel itself and companies that are advancing its military efforts in Gaza as the death toll grows and the humanitarian crisis deepens. Protesters on other campuses are voicing similar demands.

MIT students have made some specific allegations, including that the school receives money from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for research, and have urged the university to be more transparent about its Israeli ties. A spokesperson for MIT, Kimberly Allen, declined to provide specifics, saying that the school’s faculty and researchers work with scientists and entities across the globe, including in Israel.

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Publicly available documents provide some clues: MIT reported receiving $2.8 million in grants, gifts, and contracts from Israeli entities between 2020 and 2024, according to data from the US Department of Education. The department does not specify whether the funds come from individual, academic, or public sources, or how they are spent.

“MIT strongly supports the principles of academic freedom that enable our faculty to engage with a wide array of partners in the pursuit of knowledge,” Allen said. “Sponsored research projects on campus involve work that is open and publishable and that contributes to knowledge that is freely available to scientists worldwide.”

There are differences between the Russian invasion and the Israeli campaign. Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked; Israel is waging a war against Hamas after the militant group-led an attack on Israel last year that killed about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, while another 250 were taken hostage.

Student protestors at MIT and other campuses who set up encampments in recent days, and are refusing to move until their demands are met, are focused on the toll of the Israel-Hamas war rather than its cause. The Israeli campaign has killed more than 30,000 Gazans, according to the local Ministry of Health, reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble, and displaced the vast majority of the territory’s residents.

When MIT took a position on the Russian invasion, there was little pushback. Russia, unlike Israel, is a US adversary. And the conflict did not create intense divisions on campus, where today some Jewish students allege the pro-Palestinian movement contains antisemitism within its ranks, and some pro-Palestinian students allege discrimination and suppression of their speech.

“Ending our connection to this academic community comes with considerable sadness, but the actions of the Russian government made our choice clear,” former MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a news release days after Russia’s invasion began.

MIT’s project in Russia, aimed at creating a tech hub and graduate university on the outskirts of Moscow, is not the only time MIT has reconsidered some of its foreign research relationships. The Cambridge institute reassessed its ties to Saudi Arabia after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist killed by Saudi operatives in 2018. After an internal review, however, the university determined that professors should be able to continue research projects with students, researchers, and sponsors in Saudi Arabia.

MIT reported it received more than $20 million in grants, contracts, and gifts from sources in Saudi Arabia between 2020 and 2024, according to the Department of Education.

Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, said she was not surprised to hear that some research at the school is funded by Israeli sources. She said there should be an open, public discussion among faculty members, staff, and students about support for research.

“There are lots of questionable sources of funding on campus,” Kanwisher said.

The school’s graduate student union and undergraduate student association recently passed referendums calling on MIT to end research ties to Israel. Students hope the protest encampments will motivate administrators to stop accepting research dollars from Israeli sources, said Safiyyah Ogundipe, a senior at MIT studying chemical engineering.

“MIT does have the ability if it wants to cut these ties,” Ogundipe said.

In response to the referendum, which passed earlier this semester with 64 percent of the votes, chancellor Melissa Nobles wrote to the school community that MIT “relies on rigorous processes to ensure that all funded research complies with MIT policies and US law.”

“Within those standards, MIT faculty have the fundamental academic freedom to pursue funding for research of interest in their fields,” Nobles said. She added that undergraduate resolutions do not have binding power and “should not be construed by anyone as representing the MIT administration.”

Daniel Shen, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science who helped write the referendum for the graduate student union, said it is a “strong example of the collective democratic process our union is all about.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, holds two degrees from MIT. Allen declined to comment on Netanyahu’s engagement with the university.

Some student protesters at MIT and elsewhere are also calling on institutions to divest their endowments from Israeli companies, efforts they say are inspired by boycotts used to help end apartheid in South Africa. Israeli officials have rejected comparisons to apartheid. Many Jewish leaders say the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a decades-old campaign against Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, is antisemitic because it villainizes and singles out the Jewish state.

Luis M. Viceira, a Harvard Business School professor, said divesting from Israeli companies does not make sense from an investment perspective, and would unfairly punish Israeli companies and individuals.

“It is completely legitimate to agree or to disagree with the policies of the current Israeli government . . . but a divesting program from Israel is akin to a hurtful slap on the face to the entire country, an established democracy, not just their government,” Viceira said.

Charles A. Skorina, managing partner of an executive search firm for investment professionals, said investment officers should not be swayed by student calls to divest.

“Most chief investment officers are agnostic, because they’re supposed to be,” Skorina said. “Their assignment is: Please make money for the school. Period.”

At MIT, student organizers said they are more focused on calling on administrators to end research ties with Israel, citing the university’s history as a federal contractor and work with the Department of Defense.

“Israel is enacting war crimes,” Ogundipe said. “What does it mean for MIT to continue to take their money?”

Hilary Burns can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @Hilarysburns .

Definition of 'research student'

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Roberts group publishes synthetic chemistry research in Science

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/25/2024) – The Roberts group recently published a new paper in  Science that explores enabling the use of a previously inaccessible functional group for N-heteroaromatic compounds.  Science – the flagship journal for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – publishes groundbreaking research across the spectrum of scientific fields. 

N-Heteroaromatic are an important class of molecules which are key to elements of pharmaceutical, agrochemicals and materials. Efficient and innovative methods to make functionalized heteroarenes are needed to make these critical molecules more readily available. One attractive method for the synthesis of N-heteroaromatic compounds would be the use of a N-heteroaryne – an aromatic ring containing a nitrogen atom and a triple bond. N-heteroarynes within 6-membered rings have been used as key intermediates for synthetic chemists, however after 120 years of aryne research the use of 5-membered N-heteroarynes has remained elusive. Notably, a computational model has predicted these 5-membered N-heteroarynes to be “inaccessible”, meaning they cannot be accessed synthetically due to the excessive strain associated with forming a triple bond within a small 5-membered ring.

The Roberts group hypothesized by applying principles of organometallic chemistry, forming 5-membered N-heteroarynes at a metal center would alleviate strain through back-bonding and allow access to this previously inaccessible functional group.  In a report which was published in  Science , the Roberts group achieved the first synthesis of 7-azaindole-2,3-yne complexes using phosphine-ligated nickel complexes. The complexes were characterized by X-ray crystallography and spectroscopy. Additionally, the complexes showed ambiphilic reactivity, meaning they react with both nucleophiles and electrophiles, making them an exceptionally versatile tool for the synthesis of N-heteroaromatic compounds. This exciting research breakthrough will have important applications in expanding the “chemist’s toolbox” for developing new pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and materials, and also provide fundamental insights on accessing synthetically useful strained intermediates.

This new work from the Roberts group was enabled by the National Institutes of Health, and by a multitude of fellowships held by the paper’s collaborators. Fifth-year PhD candidate Erin Plasek is supported by the UMN Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship;  fifth-year student Jenna Humke is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program; both Plasek and Humke are supported by Department of Chemistry Fourth-Year Excellence Fellowships; and third-year graduate student Sallu Kargbo was supported by the Gleysteen Departmental First Year Fellowship. For leadership excellence of her research program, Courtney Roberts has been awarded the 3M Alumni Professorship, the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, the Amgen Young Investigator Award, and the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award in the past year alone.

“It is incredibly exciting to see this work, which started out as a few lines in my initial job proposals, come to fruition because of the exceptional team of students and postdocs behind it. We are delighted to finally share this new functional group for 5-membered N-heterocycles with the synthetic community,” Roberts writes.

Founded in 2019, the Roberts group uses inorganic and organometallic chemistry and catalysis to solve fundamental problems in synthetic organic chemistry related to pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and materials. They have published work related to early transition metal catalysis, photochemical reactions, and inducing regioselectivity in metal-mediated aryne reactions. The group now consists of 14 graduate students, two postdoctoral associates, and one undergraduate researcher from a range of organic and inorganic backgrounds, which allows the team to take a multidisciplinary approach to solving research problems. They value diversity, collaboration, inclusivity, and radical candor in everything they do.

Roberts Group Website

Science Vol. 384 Issue 6694

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Exploring Student Perspectives: How Graduate Students in a Life Science Department Define Success

Maryrose weatherton.

† Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996

Elisabeth E. Schussler

Research in science education often has the goal of enhancing student success, yet there is a dearth of literature related to how students define success for themselves. In this study, we explored how 10 life science graduate students defined the term “success,” as well as their experiences related to success. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis, we discovered that students had definitions of success that included multiple components and that students’ definitions varied widely and were influenced by a number of factors. Students described challenges to their success—including lack of departmental support—as well as supports to their success—like caring relationships with others. Students felt guilty about having definitions that were not wholly academic, and their perceived misalignments between these definitions and those of their advisors or department generated negative feelings and a low sense of belonging. Finally, students described how their definitions of success had changed since entering graduate school. Our results suggest that student definitions of success are complex and that, as researchers and programs seek to enhance student success, they should attend to the diverse perspectives that students have about this concept; this may be an integral strategy to address students’ well-being within academia.

INTRODUCTION

How success is defined within higher education is a complex and important topic. The term “student success” has myriad colloquial and educational meanings; the term can indicate a metric, an independent variable, or a theoretical framework, or it can refer to a process ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). Given these uses, it is often unclear how the term is defined. Indeed, our previous work revealed that the term “student success” is often invoked within a research context without being explicitly defined ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). How success is defined is important, because these definitions have cascading impacts on how success is measured, how policy is created, and how students fare within academia. For example, if success is defined solely as an academic construct, then metrics to measure student success may include grade point average (GPA) and standardized test scores. Thus, university admissions policies will likely focus on incoming students’ transcripts and Scholastic Aptitude Test or Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, as opposed to a holistic review, impacting students’ outcomes in terms of university admission. Furthermore, the way success is defined may have societal impacts in terms of which students persist within higher education and who then comprises the nation’s future workforce. Thus, these definitions need to be clear and diverse enough to be inclusive of success for all. However, most definitions of success in the literature are outlined by researchers, faculty members, or institutional leaders. Explicitly missing are the voices of students themselves, who are, of course, also experts in student success.

Previous work exploring students’ definitions of ill-defined constructs (e.g., interest, Rowland et al. , 2019 ; failure, Henry et al. , 2019 ) discovered that students have unique points of view, which are not always aligned with the extant literature or institutional practices. We hypothesize that similar misalignments exist between students’ definitions of success and those present within academic and institutional domains ( Brauer et al. , 2021 ; Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). If students’ definitions of success are not aligned with extant definitions, this may have cascading negative impacts because of the student perception that they do not meet the existing standards for success, and thus do not belong. To explore the impacts of misalignments, we must first examine whether these misalignments exist; while “institutional” definitions of success are relatively easy to glean from extant literature and academic policy, graduate students’ perspectives are explicitly missing from the literature. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been an empirical examination of how graduate students define “success.” Thus, the present qualitative study probes how graduate students in one program define success for themselves both within and outside their graduate program. Methodologically, qualitative studies of student views of success offer the needed nuance and richness to construct these complex ideas. Thus, this study used a phenomenological approach to capture the voices of graduate students in a life science program at a research-intensive university in the southeastern United States. Our study had two objectives: 1) Explore how graduate students in a life science program define success. 2) Explore how graduate students describe their experiences related to success.

How Has “Success” Been Defined in the Literature?

“Success” has been discussed in education literature for more than 50 years, though it has rarely been explicitly defined ( Carmichael, 1913 ; Brogden and Taylor, 1950 ; Tinto, 1975 ; Baird, 1985 ). “Common criteria” measures dominated the nascent field of education research, with reports highlighting the effectiveness of measures like ACT, GRE, and GPA scores to identify successful students ( Robertson and Hall, 1964 ). These studies implicitly defined success at all levels of education as high scores on these relatively one-dimensional, quantitative measures. Contemporaries, like Hartnett and Willingham (1980) , highlighted the need for more in-depth measures of success, especially at the graduate level; Hartnett and Willingham pointed to issues like the variability of comprehensive exams across disciplines and how factors like GPA struggled to capture the full range of differences in graduate student performance ( Hartnett and Willingham, 1980 ). In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers debated various factors that influenced student success and proposed models of student socialization and attrition patterns at universities ( Panos and Astin, 1968 ; Spady, 1970 ; Tinto, 1975 ). Much of the field’s focus during this time was on student attrition, implicitly defining success as student persistence. Of these studies, only Tinto’s ( 1993 ) work focused specifically on doctoral students’ departure from graduate programs, indicating that graduate student success was measured by progress through their degree programs.

Success is defined more often in the modern literature, though there is still little consensus on which definitions of success are most useful to capture intended student outcomes. Much of the recent literature that provides a definition for graduate student success focuses on quantitative measures like time to degree and graduation rates ( Gilmore et al. , 2016 ; Zhou and Okahana, 2019 ; Matheka et al. , 2020 ). Few studies have incorporated qualitative metrics like subjective well-being into their measures of success ( Castro et al. , 2011 ; Fisher et al. , 2019 ). Fisher et al. (2019) measured both publication rate and subjective well-being to interpret pathways to student success for underrepresented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral students. While the field may be in the process of developing a more nuanced view of success by incorporating both quantitative and qualitative measures and expanding the populations that it studies, it has still overlooked a critical voice in the pursuit of a definition of graduate success: that of graduate students themselves.

How Do Students Define Success?

While, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been any empirical work examining graduate students’ definitions of success, previous work in undergraduate populations has found that these students have diverse definitions of success. For example, O’Shea and Delahunty (2018) found that first-generation undergraduate students defined success in terms of persistence or “defying the odds” and feeling accomplished. Similarly, Oh and Kim (2016) found that students of different cultural backgrounds had divergent definitions of success; for example, Mexican-American students’ definitions included helping those in their communities, and Korean-American students often included making their families proud in their definitions ( Oh and Kim, 2016 ). These relatively “nontraditional” definitions of success are not often broadcast by academic institutions—in terms of the structures that they promote, how success is discussed, or how students are implicitly taught about success. We believe that a lack of representative definitions may lead to a host of issues, including a low sense of belonging and poor mental health for students who hold nontraditional definitions of success ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ).

It is likely that graduate and undergraduate students have similar definitions of success, though it is unclear how similar they are, as there is a dearth of literature related to graduate students’ perspectives on the topic. Thus, documenting diverse definitions of success in both undergraduate and graduate students will contribute to the gap in the academic literature around success. Furthermore, if these definitions are recognized and broadcast by institutions and leaders in the field, it may also positively impact students’ well-being and sense of belonging within academia.

What Factors May Impact Graduate Students’ Definitions of Success?

Graduate students’ definitions of success are likely to be as unique as each individual within a study, because they are influenced by many factors, such as future goals, past experiences, self-concept, and peer influence, among others. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no empirical work to support the influence of these factors on students’ definitions of success. Here, we will review four factors that have previously been linked to students’ outcomes in their graduate programs: students’ cultural background and family values, academic socialization and identity formation, the student–advisor relationship, and departmental policies and structures. We review these factors because they have been shown to strongly impact students’ well-being, persistence, and overall experience within their graduate programs (e.g., cultural background, Chapdelaine and Alextich, 2004 ; socialization, Tinto, 1993 ; Lovitts, 2002 ; student–advisor relationship, Lovitts, 2002 ; Sverdlik et al. , 2018 ; departmental policies, Sverdlik et al. , 2018 ). We posit that if these factors impact student outcomes broadly, then they may impact students’ definitions of success and experiences related to success in their program as well, though this has not been thoroughly studied.

Cultural Background and Family Values.

Attaining success is a goal that many families try to instill in their children. However, the definition of “success” or “achievement” can vary widely by cultural background or family history; for instance, academic achievement may be seen as a means to future career success or as a means to bring honor to one’s family ( Trumbull and Rothstein-Fisch, 2011 ). The outcomes of these differences have been examined empirically; for example, Oh and Kim (2016) investigated differences in academic goals between Korean-American and Mexican-American undergraduate students and found that cultural norms and familial expectations had a large impact on undergraduate students’ definitions of academic success. Korean-American undergraduate students reported higher or more stringent expectations from family than Mexican-American students ( Oh and Kim, 2016 ). Structural equation modeling by Scheitle and colleagues ( 2021 ) found that graduate students’ perceptions of “family values” were strong mediators of students’ career goals, highlighting the importance that student values may have on their career intentions and thus how they define success. Variation in graduate students’ family values and cultural backgrounds certainly influences their experiences while in graduate school, such as students’ definitions of an ideal mentor ( Rose, 2005 ), the relative importance of academic independence ( Swagler and Ellis, 2003 ), and experiences of bias ( Scherr et al. , 2020 ).

Socialization and Identity.

When considering graduate students’ definitions of success, academic relationships become especially relevant, as these relationships are one of the vehicles for student socialization. Socialization is the process of learning norms, skills, and values of a particular group or community (such as an academic department). During socialization, students are implicitly taught what is and is not acceptable in terms of work–life balance, values, goals, and future career choices ( Lovitts, 2007 ; Sallee, 2011 ; Perez et al. , 2020 ). We can imagine, then, that the process of socialization may also work to shape students’ definitions of success. At the graduate level, socialization has been hypothesized as an integral step in developing students’ academic identities and sense of belonging within a field ( Adler and Adler, 2005 ; Liddell et al. , 2014 ). However, improper socialization can occur when graduate students feel as if they do not “fit the mold” of their programs, and this can lead to negative consequences for students’ well-being, self-concept, and intention to persist ( Gardner, 2008b ; Griffin et al. , 2020 ). Thus, if students have different definitions of success than those conveyed during the process of socialization, they may feel tension between these definitions, and this tension may ultimately lead to negative consequences in terms of students’ well-being or persistence.

Student–Advisor Relationship.

The student–advisor relationship has frequently been implicated as the most important predictor of the outcome of a student’s graduate experience ( Golde, 2005 ; Zhao et al. , 2007 ). Lovitts (2002) outlined the many outcomes over which an advisor holds influence: formation of a student’s academic identity, development of a professional network, and the student’s subsequent job prospects. Especially relevant is the advisor’s contribution as a mentor; German et al. (2019) found that doctoral students who were satisfied with the mentorship they received from their advisors were more likely to be satisfied with their job offers postgraduation. While career satisfaction is merely one way to measure success, this study reveals the integral role advisors play when it comes to influencing student conceptions of success. On the other hand, negative interactions with advisors are prevalent in graduate school and can have detrimental impacts on students’ experience and well-being. In a study of graduate students’ negative mentoring experiences, Tuma et al. (2021) found that nearly half of their participants reported a mismatch with their advisors in terms of work style, values, or career goals and that these misalignments resulted in lower-quality relationships and a more negative graduate school experience. Clearly, as a driver of students’ socialization and identity development, advisors hold sway over the norms and expectations around success that are expressed to students ( Gearity and Mertz, 2012 ).

Departmental Structures.

Beyond the interactions that graduate students have with those in their departments, departmental structures , like financial resources, graduation requirements, and networking opportunities can also influence student goals and definitions of success. O’Meara and colleagues ( 2014 ) found that departments had the ability to positively influence student agency by encouraging multiple career paths, providing information and financial support, and offering mentoring and guidance. Furthermore, departments broadcast their values in regard to success through the structures they promote—like program requirements and employee policies. For example, Bodkin and Fleming (2021) described the lack of formal “family-friendly” policies (i.e., paid leave, childcare assistance) for graduate students in the United States and hypothesized that these policies, or lack thereof, may contribute to women doctoral students leaving their programs at a higher rate than men. This finding suggests that student definitions of success (i.e., having a family and a career, maintaining work–life balance) are likely to be influenced by the policies and resources of their programs as much as by the people within the programs.

Study Objectives

The present study on definitions of student success is novel, because it gathers graduate students’ perspectives and centers their voices in the literature. Furthermore, this study aims to explore how graduate students describe their experiences related to success within graduate school in order to investigate factors that contribute to student well-being and persistence. Therefore, this study had two broad objectives: 1) Explore how graduate students in a life science program define success. 2) Explore how graduate students describe their experiences related to success.

Methodological Framework

To explore how graduate students understand and experience the phenomenon of success within their graduate program, we used an interpretive phenomenological approach, guided by Smith et al. (2009) . Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) is couched in a constructivist epistemology and, as such, seeks to capture how participants make sense of their worlds. As opposed to pure phenomenology, IPA seeks to understand participants’ interpretation of a phenomenon in the context of their political, social, and cultural contexts. Thus, given our research questions, phenomenology and IPA were the most appropriate methodological tools. Before participants were contacted, a detailed research plan was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (IRB-20-05870-XP).

Participants

The most integral criterion for participation in a phenomenological inquiry is that participants must have experience with the phenomenon in question ( Creswell and Creswell, 2017 ). Thus, we recruited graduate students who had completed at least 1 year of their program. For this study, we focused on the experiences of graduate students in a specific life sciences department, as M.W. is a graduate student in the same domain. A critical assumption of phenomenological study is that within interviews and discussions “there is an essence or essences of shared experience” between participants and the researcher ( Merriam and Tisdell, 2015 , p. 26).

Graduate students in one life science department ( N = 60; 12% MS and 88% PhD) were recruited in Fall 2020 via an institutional email list to participate in one 40- to 60-minute interview about their definitions of and experiences with success in their graduate program. All individuals who expressed interest and who met the aforementioned criteria were invited to participate. Ten out of 60 graduate students in the department completed interviews. Although master’s degree students were not excluded from our recruitment, only PhD students responded to our requests for interviews. Interviews lasted from 40–120 minutes, with an average length of 50 minutes. The interviewer let participants share their experiences and perspectives for as long as they wanted, resulting in the observed variability in interview lengths.

At the time of their interviews, all participants were pursuing doctoral degrees in the same life science department at the same research-intensive university. Our sample was majority female (60%), domestic students (60%; Table 1 ). There was an equal split between white and non-white students; to protect the identities of our participants, race will not be identified further. Fifty percent of our sample identified as first-generation students (i.e., neither of their parents possessed a college degree). Finally, 50% of our participants had passed their qualifying exams at the time of interview, a step typically occurring in the second or third year of the program, and thus were considered PhD candidates. More than half of the participants had a stated future career goal as a research-focused academic (e.g., tenure-track faculty at a research-intensive university). Participants also mentioned several other career goals, including teaching-focused academic positions (e.g., faculty at a primarily undergraduate institution), careers with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; e.g., the Nature Conservancy), at governmental agencies (e.g., the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of the Interior), private sector research, K–12 STEM education, and other careers outside science altogether ( Table 1 ). Note that, because participants often cited multiple career goals, the frequency counts total more than 10.

Demographic characteristics of sample population ( N = 10)

Interview questions were developed by the researchers to generally probe the research questions. The goal was to provide prompts that allowed participants to share their ideas broadly. When developing interview questions, the researchers had in mind the literature regarding factors that may influence students’ definitions of success (cultural background, family values, socialization, etc.), though a conscious effort was made to create interview questions that were not leading and aimed to capture participants’ individual experiences and perceptions. Interview questions went through several rounds of refinement within the researchers’ lab group and members of the M.W.’s dissertation committee. After this, interview questions were further edited for clarity, construct validity, and reliability based on feedback from pilot interviews, which took place in Summer 2020 and involved several graduate students from the same research-intensive university as the study population.

To support confidentiality, participants were given pseudonyms before interviews took place so that participants’ real names were never associated with their data. These participant pseudonyms are used throughout the rest of this paper. The interviews took place from October through December 2020. After reviewing consent documents with participants, semistructured interviews were conducted over Zoom teleconferencing software ( 2020 ) at the day and time of a participant’s choosing. We note that interviews took place during the global COVID-19 pandemic and, as such, were conducted exclusively over Zoom in order to comply with health guidelines. The semistructured interview questions probed the following topics: participants’ definitions of success, why participants decided to pursue a graduate degree, and participants’ thoughts on how likely they were to achieve success ( Table 2 ). Furthermore, participants were asked about what factors influenced their definitions of success. Due to the nature of semistructured interviews, each interview covered the same topics, but based on the participants’ answers, follow-up questions allowed each interview to explore slightly different areas within those topics ( Smith et al. , 2009 ; Creswell and Creswell, 2017 ). For example, although the researchers did not ask specifically about graduate students’ experiences with the coinciding COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of the participants mentioned the topic. Interviews were audio-recorded using Zoom teleconferencing software ( 2020 ) and transcribed by the primary author (M.W.) using Otter transcription software ( 2021 ).

Interview questions

We used Smith et al. ’s ( 2009 ) IPA methods to analyze our interview data. The general process of IPA entails: 1) reading and rereading transcripts, 2) initial noting, 3) developing emergent themes, 4) searching for connections across emergent themes, and 5) looking for patterns across cases ( Smith et al. , 2009 ).

Each transcript was analyzed individually before noting any themes that transcended interviews; this is essential to the IPA process and draws on the method’s idiographic roots ( Eatough and Smith, 2006 ; Smith et al. , 2009 ). Thus, the following process was followed: the transcript was read at least three times by the authors while they separately annotated it to note linguistic and descriptive codes, as well as larger conceptual themes. This was repeated for each transcript, after which emergent themes were developed based on shared participant experiences. Throughout the process, both researchers make a conscious effort to “bracket,” or set aside, their preconceptions of student success and the factors that may impact it as well as previous transcripts they had read. More details on bracketing and the inductive coding process in IPA can be found in Smith et al. ’s guide to IPA ( 2009 ).

After reviewing all transcripts independently, both researchers met to discuss their codes and themes and to develop a combined codebook. M.W. then finalized the codebook, which was used to assign codes to all transcripts. E.E.S. then conducted a coding audit by using the final codebook to check the codes assigned to the data. A coding audit helps to develop the coherence and plausibility of the interpretation of the data within an interpretive phenomenological analysis ( Smith et al. , 2009 ). It is important to note that the process of “auditing” within IPA is different from the more common process of measuring interrater reliability. Auditing only intends to ensure that the account produced is credible, though it leaves room for the possibility that other, equally valid, interpretations may exist ( Smith et al. , 2009 ). Given the constructivist epistemology of our chosen method, a coding audit is the most appropriate way to ensure validity. After a coding audit was completed, M.W. and E.E.S. reviewed any disagreements in coding together and came to a final agreement on themes.

After all participants’ transcripts had been coded and emergent themes were finalized, M.W. performed member checks. This entailed securely sending participants their transcribed interviews with codes and themes annotated throughout. Participants were asked if the transcripts were accurate and if the researchers’ codes and themes captured their experiences with success in the graduate program. Four of the 10 participants responded to researchers’ requests for feedback, and none of those participants indicated that they had anything to add or edit in terms of their interview transcripts and researchers’ interpretations of their experiences.

Many methods traditionally used to evaluate aspects of qualitative work, like its transferability and reliability, aim to ensure a uniformity of results among researchers. However, within IPA and an interpretive philosophical framework generally, a foundational epistemological assumption is that participants’ experiences are individually constructed according to their social contexts; therefore, there is no universal truth to report. Thus, conventional methods of validity are not applicable to IPA. Instead, leaders in the field of IPA discuss that rigor and validity are primarily derived from accurately reflecting participants’ lived experiences ( Yardley, 2000 ; Smith et al. , 2009 ; Kirn and Benson, 2018 ).

We used Yardley’s ( 2000 ) principles for assessing qualitative research as a framework for providing validity evidence for the methods of this study. These principles include sensitivity to context, commitment and rigor, coherence, and impact and importance. This study demonstrated sensitivity to context through the recruitment of a purposive sample of participants with personal experience with the phenomenon in question. Furthermore, the researchers tried to minimize power differentials between the interviewer and participants by having a researcher of the same power level (i.e., a fellow graduate student) interview participants, as well as conducting interviews at times and in settings that participants chose. This facilitated participants feeling comfortable to fully express themselves and is an aspect of both sensitivity to context and commitment and rigor ( Walther et al. , 2013 ; Kirn and Benson, 2018 ). Rigor was also ensured by a thorough and systematic analysis of the data, using methods like coding audits and clear annotation of participants’ transcripts. This study exhibited coherence by logically ordering themes and presenting participants’ voices as clearly as possible. Yardley (2000) claims that validity via the principles of importance and impact are met when participants felt their voices were adequately represented, which we ensured through the process of member checks.

Research Question 1: How Do Graduate Students in a Life Science Department Define Success?

Participants defined success in various ways, and these definitions comprised many components—from academic and career success to resilience and having a life aligned with students’ personal values ( Table 3 and Figure 1 ). Many of the components of participants’ definitions of success, while coded separately, were inextricably linked, as Dahlia exemplifies: “I define success as, at least for this program in graduate school, like acquiring the skills that it takes and the resources it takes to have a career that you’re happy with and feel like you have an impact.” This definition of success included the “gaining skills,” “career success,” and “aligned with values” codes. Like Dahlia, all of our participants had definitions of success with multiple components, which accounts for the overlapping frequency counts in Table 3 .

Components of participants’ definitions of success and the number of participants who identified with that component ( N = 10)

Heat map of participants’ definitions of success. Participants are listed horizontally across the top of the chart, and components of participants’ definitions of success are listed vertically on the left side of the chart. Filled-in sections represent the presence of the component (code) in participants’ definition of success.

The most common components within participants’ definitions of success included success as academic achievement (eight participants), career success (six participants), having a career that was aligned with their values (six participants), and gaining skills (six participants). Academic achievement was coded when students talked about success as it related to aspects of their graduate program, like publishing papers, getting grants, passing courses, and graduating. For example, when discussing her definition of success, Lily said, “I mean, if I can get like a pub[lication] every year, that’s great, you know, so I mean, definitely publications is part of success.”

Academic components of students’ definitions were closely tied to career success, which was coded when participants related success to what happened after their graduate program, such as getting a well-paying job, having career flexibility, or being able to get a postdoc position in an interesting field. When talking about how she defined success at the start of her PhD program, Dahlia had a very career-based definition of success: “So, I think, like, I used to define success successes as you know, basically achieving what it takes to become an R1 researcher.” However, when interviews took place, Dahlia had a career goal of working outside of academia and science altogether.

In addition to academic and career success, students often mentioned that they would feel successful if they were able to move through their graduate program in a way that was aligned with their values. The “aligned with values” code was assigned to any definition of success in which participants mentioned seeking fulfillment, delineated their value systems, or related their success to a value they had mentioned previously in the interview (e.g., helping others, honesty). For example, David’s definition of success included “[finding] emotional and intellectual fulfilment, within a career that also allows me to make money with a product framework that does not require the continual betrayal of self.” David conveyed that he wanted to feel intellectually stimulated by both his graduate program and future career, while simultaneously feeling that he was staying true to himself.

Definitional components coded under “gaining skills” often occurred together with other success components, because students often saw the process of gaining skills (in quantitative analysis, writing, and so on) as necessary to achieve academic or career success. Lily, whose career goal was to get a job in academia, included gaining skills in her definition, as she felt that these skills were required to achieve career success: “If I have the skill set that I can get a job, I feel like I’ll be successful, because if I can’t get a job in academia with a PhD, I’m gonna feel pretty unsuccessful.” This code was employed anytime students mentioned gaining skills, getting better at a certain skill (e.g., data analysis, working cooperatively), increasing their toolset, or any similar statements.

Definitional components mentioned by less than half of the participants were achieving goals, happiness, and resilience. A definition that included “achieving goals” was coded whenever participants explicitly mentioned setting and working toward some goal, as Milo does here: “For me, success is just an achievement of your goal. Even if there are small goal[s], just my plan every day to do everything I planned the day before. [That is] success.” Similar to other codes, students mentioned achieving goals as merely one aspect of their success, and these codes often overlapped with others, as in Scarlet’s definition: “[Success] is both meeting goals, personal goals, professional goals, but it’s also meeting them in a way that fits with your broader value system.” This definition includes both “achieving goals” and “alignment with values” components. The “achieving goals” component was only coded within definitions that explicitly discussed meeting goals. If participants mentioned specific goals, such as graduating, or gaining a government career, those would be coded under academic and career success, respectively.

A small group of students ( N = 3) mentioned that one component of success was achieving personal happiness. The happiness component was coded whenever participants specifically mentioned happiness or being happy, whereas “feeling fulfilled” or “doing what I like,” while similar in sentiment, would have been coded under “aligned with values” and “career success” components, respectively. Students often cited the happiness component in opposition to a previous way of defining success, as Lily did: “Happiness has definitely factored into success as I’ve gone along, because I realized you can make yourself completely miserable and [in my] master’s [program] I definitely struggled with that.” Here, Lily mentions her master’s program, where she felt she did not have a strong work–life balance and prioritized getting her work done over her mental health.

Definitions of success that included a “resilience” component were often mentioned in conversations related to students’ mental health. A definition of success that included resilience was coded anytime students mentioned “resilience” specifically or otherwise mentioned overcoming obstacles or recovering quickly from failure. Phea, after having an especially difficult year in graduate school, cited resilience as the most important component of her definition of success:

And I think a lot of [what] I realized is that being resilient is pretty critical. I’ve had a couple of personal problems … the last two years have been more challenging than, you know, compared with the rest of my life. And so, I think that I’ve seen that people who are able to bounce back and get back on the wagon tend to just be happier. And, you know, forget the outcomes, they just tend to have a better quality of life. And so, I think I want that for myself. Yeah, I realized the importance of resilience as something really integral to success.

Indeed, in both “happiness” and “resilience” definitional components, students seemed to be prioritizing their own quality of life over outcomes, as Phea indicated.

Overall, the 10 participants had an average of 3.7 components to their definitions of success, with a range between 2 and 5. There was no success component that every participant included in their definition of success ( Figure 1 ).

Factors That Shaped Participants’ Definitions of Success

In response to what shaped their definitions of success, participants mentioned five factors: family and cultural values ( n = 7), past experiences ( n = 6), friends or other students ( n = 5), personal values ( n = 5), and academic advisors ( n = 2). Family and cultural values were the most commonly mentioned factors, with family and cultural values being coded anytime a student mentioned formative experiences with their families, cultures, or how they were raised. These values were very important to Hector’s definition of success: “I think that [my definition of success] comes from a lot, um, a lot of probably family values. And just a lot of just my upbringing where, you know, my parents always encouraged me, my siblings always encouraged me to make a difference in your community to, you know, to use your gifts to help bring out the best in other people.” Indeed, Hector detailed that his family values influenced his personal values, which drove him toward a career teaching others about biodiversity and the importance of local habitats, thus his motivation for completing his graduate program.

The code “past experiences” was used when participants cited any past experiences that did not fall into the other categories (e.g., a past experience with an advisor would fall under “academic advisor”). Past experiences, like experiences working in their intended career fields, helped students learn what success metrics and definitions were practical, as Lily describes: “Yeah, I think the definition of success comes [from having] ‘real person jobs’ in between my master’s and this [my PhD], and just finding out what some of those opportunities were like beforehand, and what could I be sustainably happy with.” These experiences in the “real world” gave students like Lily concrete examples of future career paths that they could use to support their definitions of success.

“Friends or other students” was coded when participants mentioned interactions or conversations with others that influenced how they thought of success. These interactions often drove students to define their own success in opposition to how they saw friends or other graduate students defining the term. For example, Heather’s definition of success was greatly influenced by her experiences with others in her program: “Moving into graduate school has even more cemented that I’m seeing students that look successful in their academic life but may not be successful in other realms of their life.” Indeed, Heather’s definition of success included academic and career components, as well as striving for happiness.

“Personal values” was coded whenever participants mentioned forming their definitions of success in accordance with specific personal values. If participants just mentioned “values” generally as shaping their definition of success, researchers followed up to investigate whether those were personal, family, or cultural values or some combination thereof. Personal values mentioned by participants were often the driving forces behind their careers in academia, participants mentioned curiosity, the need to help others, and striving to solve challenges. For example, Phea mentions that her whole life is motivated by solving problems and helping others, and these motivations naturally impacted her definitions of success: “I think my, both these definitions of success to me are very personal … they’re what I aspire to, rather than something that I’ve … that I’ve really just inherited from family or something external. Like, I’m very motivated by solving problems with a connection to causes that I care about. I think that comes from just my own my own motivation.” Participants who mentioned the influence of personal values seemed to be very passionate about their values and were often able to explicitly tie these values to their impact on their definitions of success, career goals, and overall motivations.

Finally, “academic advisor” was coded when students specifically mentioned current or previous academic advisors. Interestingly, both times academic advisors were mentioned as influencing a students’ definition of success, they were academic advisors from students’ undergraduate research experiences. Here, Scarlet describes how her former advisor completely changed the way she saw success: “She [my undergraduate advisor] instilled in me that just because you reach your goals does not make you successful. And that there are so many other ways to find success.” This may suggest that the influence of undergraduate advisors can have persisting impacts throughout graduate school.

Research Question 2: How Do Graduate Students in a Life Science Department Describe Their Experiences Related to Success?

Participants’ discussions about success were categorized into four overall themes that resonated throughout the interview data set. These findings were less about participant definitions of success and more about things that had happened to them related to success in graduate school. These themes were “challenges to success,” “supports to success,” “conflicting definitions of success,” and “reconsidering success” ( Figure 2 ). Taken together, these themes highlight these graduate students’ journeys as they realized what success meant to them, what they needed to be successful, and how to navigate misalignments between their definitions and those of others in the system. In this section, we discuss each theme and its codes.

Themes and codes present within participants’ interviews. Squares represent themes, while ovals represent codes.

Themes 1 and 2: Challenges and Supports to Students’ Success

The first two themes we describe are diametrically related: challenges and supports to students’ success. Participants discussed at length the challenges they faced and how those challenges resulted in perceived barriers to success. These may have included everyday issues like trying to get in touch with an advisor, to global issues like the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. While no two students expressed the same set of challenges, there were four codes within this theme: “poor mental health,” a “low sense of belonging,” a “lack of support,” and the “COVID-19” pandemic. Fortunately, in addition to these challenges, students cited many factors that supported their success, well-being, and persistence. These factors were encompassed by four codes: “coping,” “external support,” “other students,” and “advisors.” Each code is described in more detail below.

Challenge: Poor Mental Health.

Graduate student mental health has been a topic of concern for many advisors, departments, and institutions across a broad range of academic domains. Students in our study, like Yasmin, mirrored these concerns: “I think that science and academia can bring you to a lot of psychological problems, like anxiety, depression, and I have them all.”

These struggles with mental health often led to downstream challenges with motivation, meeting deadlines, and persistence in their program. “Poor mental health” was coded any time participants talked specifically about their mental health issues, like anxiety and depression, or whenever participants discussed feeling extremely stressed or overwhelmed or indicated that their experiences in their graduate program were distressing. For example, Dahlia discussed how, early in her program, she felt very depressed and trapped, which resulted in a lack of motivation toward her dissertation project and her program generally: “I was, like, very depressed my first semester … and so I just felt like very trapped. And it was like, every single day, I, like, very seriously contemplated dropping out because, like, I wasn’t getting any grants, and I was very understanding of why I wasn’t getting any grants, because, like, it was a dumb project that I didn’t care about.”

While many students in our study discussed poor mental health, many also recognized that struggling with their mental health was nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, a common conception among the participants was the idea that “a lot of academics” or “everyone” struggles with similar issues, so students should not feel embarrassed about seeking help. Some students, like Scarlet, even mentioned getting help as a catalyst for examining their definitions of success: “I started doing therapy … and having that external support [her therapist], having a space to really kind of, like, unpack the reasons behind I was feeling as though my success was only dependent on, you know, how many papers I put out, or my grades and things like that, really helped me better define what success is.” Thus, while most students in our study seemed to cite personal mental health struggles, many of them knew how to get help, and often expressed de-stigmatized conceptions of seeking and growing from professional help.

Challenge: Lack of Support.

One challenge to success mentioned by the participants was a perception of a lack of support, either from their advisors specifically or the department generally. For example, Dahlia discussed a lack of support from the department in relation to her intended career goals, which, notably, were to find a career outside academia and science altogether: “I think some of my struggle comes from the fact that I’m trying to follow a fairly nontraditional path. And so, I have like, no clear trajectory in which to benchmark myself against.” Similarly, Heather noted a lack of social support from her department: “The department isn’t great at building that support and that community structure.” These quotes expressed a desire for both defined goals and community as essential to graduate student success.

While this code was also likely impacted by the pandemic, students mentioned a lack of support both before and during the transition to virtual instruction. Dahlia mentioned issues with support both before and during the pandemic: “Support from your advisor is like, so important. And it’s something that is a lot better now, but like, at the beginning [my advisor] and I just like did not know how to communicate at all … and like, they would never reach out to have meetings, like I would always have to reach out to them and then it would feel like I’m defending my right to be in the program every time I would talk to them.” This quote highlights the link between feeling supported and feeling like one belongs in an academic program. Questioning the support from her advisor also made her question whether she belonged in her PhD program. Later, she mentioned that this changed after some time: “[Now] I realize that, like, [my advisor] just wants me to, like, do what makes me happy. Like, they want me to do something that I like, and will get me to a career that I’m happy with.” After a rocky start, Dahlia and her advisor figured out how to communicate in a way that worked for them, and Dahlia felt more accepted and supported.

Challenge: Low Sense of Belonging.

Like Dahlia, many students struggled with feelings of belonging in their program. A few students felt that the relatively narrow focus of each lab in the department made it difficult for them to connect with others about their work, while others felt a lack of diversity in the department made them feel like an outsider. For example, Heather discussed how the topics studied by faculty, while interesting, made it harder for her to connect with peers in the department: “But just like, my focus is very different than a lot of folks [in the department] and so it’s harder to go and engage with like, all of the seminars that talk about plants and soil, which is great for a lot of people, but not necessarily what I want to do. So, yeah … the department isn’t really great at it [making me feel included].” Some participants focused on a lack of diversity among the faculty. Indeed, one of our participants indicated that the lack of diversity within departmental faculty made her feel as if the program was not “built” for people like her: “Um, but I think a lot of it [feeling a lack of belonging] comes from like, we’re pretty white, straight, cis department all like people who have succeeded in the existing system. And so, it’s not necessarily built for a first-generation queer, female.”

Another factor driving students’ sense of belonging was the alignment of their definitions of success with those of their advisors. Although she had almost completed her program, Yasmin said that she had never shared her personal definition of success with her advisor due to a fear that it would not align with her advisor’s definition and she would be seen as less professional,

I don’t think we … I don’t think we talk about [our definitions of success]. Um, I think that most of the people I’ve been with, they don’t have the same definition of success that I do. Everyone that are like PIs or professors, I think they measure success with papers, numbers of papers, grants, and, you know, those kind of things. So, I think that I’m somewhat an exception. Yeah. For me, it’s also a little bit embarrassing. Because I feel like, as a scientist, we should all have that same definition [of success]. But we don’t, and most of scientists think that it’s like, yes, number of publications. [If I shared this definition] like, other scientists might consider me like, maybe not adequate or for the job.

While Yasmin’s reluctance to share her definition with her advisor may seem like an extreme case, many participants in our study shared similar worries about misalignments and seeming unprofessional by having definitions of success that were not “academic enough.”

Challenge to Success: COVID-19.

Interviews took place during the Fall semester of 2020, when participants were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, and transition to virtual instruction on top of existing stressors and responsibilities. Thus, it was not surprising that COVID-19 surfaced as a major challenge to participants’ success and well-being. This code encompassed anytime participants discussed COVID-19 or issues resulting from the pandemic. For example, Phea, an international student, discussed how the global pandemic, political turmoil in the United States, and cancelled plans all had a synergistic effect on her mental health: “But this year has been really difficult. Because I felt like I was doing fairly well, and I was really excited about summer because I had this grant and I recruited some undergrads and got them funding for the summer, I was really, really pumped to get some stuff done this year, and COVID just came like, like a wave and laid those plans to rest a little bit. And so, I needed to refocus and do things that were more attainable and had to change a lot of plans.”

Beyond changing plans, COVID-19 also forced many graduate students into isolation. Sense of belonging, social connection, and students’ motivations are inextricably linked, and Hector expressed how working during isolation presented a challenge to his success and motivation: “I guess my motivation has probably decreased in general, you know, I find it much harder to get up and go to work in the morning, you know, when I’m gonna be sitting in front of a computer for six or eight hours typing code. I think it has a lot to do with COVID, that we spend so much more time in quarantine and isolation that you kind of, you know, it’s like, kind of a downward spiral in a lot of ways.” Certainly, this code was unique to the timing of this study and captures a layer of nuance that likely influenced many other factors related to student perceptions of success.

Support: Coping.

The code “coping” refers to all of the ways that students conceptualized their progress and worked through the challenges within their graduate program. For example, Heather explained that remembering that her work was merely one aspect of her life helped her recover quickly from failure, in an example of an “accommodation” coping strategy: “Being able to compartmentalize [that] my graduate work is not my self-worth, or is not my success, and sort of sort of compartmentalizing … like, I’m not a failure, just because I failed at this part of grad school, I think really helps.” By doing this, Heather chose an adaptive strategy to cope with her graduate school stressors.

Another strategy that students employed was distraction, which could be viewed as a negative strategy, yet seemed to be used in a positive way by these students to establish healthy boundaries around their work–life balance. For example, Hector felt a lot of anxiety related to his research, but used “rewards” like participating in his hobbies in order to get through stressful situations: “That’s kind of what I look forward to. Yeah, you know, when I’m leaving the lab, or when I’m coming home from research, I can say, okay, tomorrow, you know, I get to go work out or tomorrow, I get to go soccer or teach, you know? And it’s a huge staple in the PhD pursuit, to have the other things in life that you can really rely on to get you through the research aspect.” Although students often listed a number of challenges in their graduate program, adaptive coping strategies helped them to set boundaries, maintain a work–life balance, and feel positive about their progress.

Support: External Support.

Students cited extensive support networks to bolster success in their programs. When these support networks included people outside academia (e.g., parents, therapists, partners) these were coded as “external support.” These external individuals were often integral for students to get an objective opinion on a situation, see a problem in a different light, or just to hold space for students to not think about their graduate work. For example, Dahlia discussed that conversations with her friends and her family helped her to relax and take her mind off her graduate work. Another way that Dahlia’s family, specifically her mom, supported her success was by providing a sounding board for her to work through her values and how those interacted with her goals for her PhD: “Talks with my mom have, like, very specifically helped me go through value orienting … like, explicitly thinking about the outcomes [that I want from my PhD] and why. She [my mom] helps me to figure out how to, like, internally validate and not judge myself based on other people’s progress.” Thus, Dahlia’s family and friends were perceived as supportive because of their objective advice and their being external to her program.

External supports, like family and friends, often provided essential affirmations that buoyed students’ spirits, such as Lily’s partner, who reminded her that she did not have to be constantly striving for success as long as she was happy: “If you’re happy being a big fish in a small pond, that’s okay. Like, you don’t owe it to anyone but yourself.” Reminders like this and other affirmations from external support systems were invaluable to graduate students’ mental health and their conceptions of success in their programs.

Support: Other Students.

Another aspect of students’ support systems were other students in their programs or in similar graduate programs. These students were all figuratively “in the trenches” together, so they could offer valuable advice, share previous experience, and perhaps most importantly relate to issues and complaints that graduate students expressed. Heather found that other students in her program supported her by simply being great friends. These friends helped to create “a better work–life balance and community structure.” Scarlet found that having conversations with graduate students outside her department built strong friendships and helped her clarify her definition of success: “Also just becoming closer friends with people in different PhD programs. They talked about ways in which they thought about their own success. So, it wasn’t kind of the same thing over and over again, that you oftentimes hear from [my department], so I was able to get perspectives from multiple different people in the program.” This suggests that peers in particular help to examine conflicts between departmental and individual definitions of success.

Support: Advisors.

Perhaps the most important factor that supported students’ success was students’ relationships with their advisor. Time and time again, education literature has found that the student–advisor relationship is one of the most important predictors of graduate student persistence and academic success ( Sverdlik et al. , 2018 ). In our study, participants discussed myriad ways that their advisors supported them, from using their institutional knowledge and their knowledge of the field and career opportunities, to simply offering emotional support and affirmations. For example, Heather’s advisor supported her by “sort of helping me establish a network and helping me shape where I want to go … just opening doors.” This indicates a potential link between advisors and external support networks.

Students, especially those who are new to academia, rely on their advisors for important systemic socialization. David, a first-generation college student, describes how his advisor shared institutional knowledge with him by explaining how to navigate the university: “‘Here’s how to finagle this system,’ ‘here’s how to exploit this sort of motive bureaucracy.’ ‘Here’s how to b***s*** your way through X or Y.’ ‘Oh, those things are excellent professional assets’ stuff like that.”

Especially for first-generation graduate students, advisors can be essential for learning how academia works. Scarlet, another first-generation college student, also describes receiving similar support from her advisor: “And I think also, one way that he helps with success is because he’s so well connected at this point. And is that at the university and in the field for so long? You know, specifically with administration issues, he knows exactly who to email exactly who to talk to, and how firm to be. And that’s something that I didn’t necessarily know that an advisor would be helpful in.” As Scarlet mentions, the need for this type of institutional support may not be obvious to some students until they recognize the benefits of this type of support.

Theme 3: Conflicting Definitions of Success

The theme of “conflicting definitions of success” came up whenever students described a difference between their definitions of success and those of their academic environment. In this section, we will talk about this theme generally, and then discuss the emotional repercussions of students’ perceptions of these conflicts. Such conflicts could come up in conversations with advisors, experiences with other academics, or simply students’ perceptions of how success was defined within the department. Hector, who had very negative feelings toward his university and the university system generally, felt that most universities prioritized profits over their students and their students’ success,

I think we’re kind of stuck in a system where we don’t get to necessarily define success, you know, that, that we’re stuck in a bit of a rat race, you know, where success is defined by our advisors or institutions, kind of the academic establishment … so I think the issues of defining success are far beyond even [my institution], it’s this whole interconnected web of all these big schools around the country that have jointly established what they perceive to be success, and then they try to force it on graduate students undergrads to feed them into this pipeline to bring in money to the university. Um, yeah, it’s a corrupt system for sure.

This belief made Hector feel like he was stuck in a system where he had to “crank out six or seven publications, write a bunch of grants, go get a postdoc somewhere, and then you enroll into an R1 institution and do the same thing.” Hector felt that these requirements were in opposition to his desire to become an excellent teacher, engage in community outreach, and foster future researchers. These beliefs, along with frustration about his ability to change the system or be listened to by his advisor or department, resulted in Hector feeling trapped and unable to achieve success.

Milo was similarly frustrated with how he felt success “must” be defined in order to be recruited for a career postgraduation. With the hopes of getting a career in academia after his graduate program, Milo had shifted his definition of success toward one that was more aligned with that of “academia” broadly:

I see how people value you just because of your papers. And I [was] like “wow, man, I need some good papers.’ Having a very good paper and high impact factor [can] just change your life. So, that changed my focus to, for example, prioritize papers compared with other goals … like, conference[s] or this kind of stuff. Yeah. Because people don’t look at how many conferences you attend[ed]. Were you instructor of record? Okay, you are in grad school, busy at teaching, and then you end up with zero paper[s] and nobody wants to recruit you.

When asked if these were just the metrics that his field used to measure success, Milo replied that “it’s just everybody in academia” who measured success that way, suggesting that there was no way to get around these definitions.

Beyond frustration, when students felt that they were faced with these conflicts, they also felt distressed or as though they were not cut out for the rigors of academic life. This was especially true when students felt that their definitions of success were misaligned with those of their advisors. This was the case for Lily, who, while not as distressed as other students, felt stressed that her definition of success was not enough compared with how her advisor would define the concept,

And [my advisor] is constantly going for, like, [governmental agency’s] grants … all these huge grants, so I’m sure their success would be raking in lots of grants, and then getting lots of publications in high impact journals. Like, I don’t know … don’t [get] me wrong, I’d love a high-impact journal. But if, you know, if I get an open journal that people can access, and it’s out there, I’m thrilled to death. So, there might be like, differences in like tiers, like, I’m happy to just get it out there. And then they’re wanting me to shoot for up there, which can be stressful.

Lily’s definition of success mainly focused on her impact on her community: “I feel like having a local impact is super important. Because otherwise, why are we doing it? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s important to leave your mark scientifically.” And, although she recognized the importance of academic achievement, she felt as if her standards may not be rigorous enough for her advisor; thus, the pair had never explicitly discussed definitions of success.

Discussions within this theme were often laden with guilt on the students’ part, like Lily’s belief that she was on a different “tier” than her advisor. These feelings of guilt or shame around students’ definitions often led to the idea that the student had to have one “public” definition of success and one “private” definition, where public definitions were often academic and career-based, based on students’ perceptions of their fields, while their internal definitions often included more nuance and a focus on well-being or things students enjoyed. For example, Yasmin wanted to have a career that was not only academically rigorous but also included time for her family, though she felt like she could not tell her advisor that: “I am applying for a postdoc, right? And so, my advisor [has been] saying, like, why don’t you apply [to] this? Why don’t you apply here? I’m thinking inside my head, I’m thinking like, because my husband won’t be able to come with me, or things like about family. And I don’t say it. It’s just immediately you think about like, no, that will make me look weak here.” Yasmin worried that any definition of success that was not solely career based might make her “look weak” in the eyes of her advisor or “maybe not adequate for the job” in the eyes of future employers. Thus, Yasmin kept her personal definition of success and her dreams of starting an NGO in her hometown to herself, while she focused on the more common “logical” path of getting a postdoc position.

Theme 4: Reconsidering Success

Throughout their interviews, students discussed the process of creating and reshaping their definitions of success—from the factors that influenced their definitions to how their definitions had changed over their graduate programs. For example, Heather, whose definition of success centered on happiness and career success, had to redefine what career success meant to her: “[My definition] shifted [in the] sense of what I want out of a job, and like, I guess better evaluating what it would mean to stay in academia versus industry and how I’m defining my happiness.” While her definition of success stayed mostly the same, what she considered to be career success expanded after having positive experiences working in a nonacademic career, and this type of change was coded under “shifting success criteria.” Students described two types of changes to their definitions: changes to their metrics of success while their definitions stayed the same, coded under “shifting success criteria,” and changes in their definitions over time, which were coded under “evolving definitions.”

Shifting Success Criteria.

A handful of students felt that the way they defined success was fixed, and instead it was their criteria for success or their metrics of success that shifted throughout their programs. For example, Lily’s definition of success included being happy and finding career success, and while that had been true since she was in high school, she described the fluidity of her criteria: “But I feel like I don’t know, maybe I have a more concrete view of what success is, but the concrete is kind of like fluid. So as long as I’m, you know, not absolutely hating what I’m doing. And I continue to like, work with animals to some degree. I’m pretty happy.”

Oftentimes, these metrics changed as students’ situations changed, in terms of changing projects, career paths, or life changes outside their graduate programs. Here, Saul describes how career success will look different at each stage of his career: “So, if I speak about success in my career, maybe after the PhD success would be like having publications and postdoc, et cetera. But during the PhD, would it be maybe like, meeting new people that are important in their fields, contributing to the area of research, expanding your horizons and publishing, right? I think [it] kind of fluctuates. I think the, the definition is quite the same, but the importance to each item changes through time.” These students thought deeply about metrics and measurements for their success. While students who considered success metrics in this way did not make up the majority of our participants, their mindset is an especially interesting one for future research.

Evolving Definitions.

Within their discussions of success, students often described a transition from an “outward” to an “inward” definition of success as they progressed through their graduate programs. Where initially many students had defined success in comparison to others, over time they shifted toward definitions that focused on internal validation. Here, Yasmin describes this process: “Like, I think at the beginning [success] was just to be a good competitive scientist, student, writer, researcher. But that brings you into the comparison and the competition … I don’t think you could target success if you’re constantly measuring by comparison. Hmm, you know what I mean? Um, so, at points success in the PhD was just finishing like, yeah, closer to the end line it was just finishing, just like graduating.”

Students in our study discussed the stress that came from the “comparison cycle,” the process of constantly comparing their success with that of other students in their programs or other scientists in their fields. Once they were able to focus on what success meant to them, students were able to have a much more rewarding graduate school experience. For example, after issues with both her advisor and her field season, Dahlia took time to re-evaluate the direction of her program and how she saw success,

Basically, there was a lot of s**t that went down with my advising situation last spring that coincided with like the complete failure of my field season. Yeah, and I took about like three weeks to have a complete mental breakdown. And then like, evaluate what I actually wanted without like trying to follow what someone else has already done. And basically, you know, took bits and pieces that I enjoyed from these other career paths, and I’m now trying to like, formulate my own … and it’s brutal, but it’s fun now.

For participants, reconsiderations of success clearly required deep thought and reflection that ultimately reshaped their thinking about what success looks like in their programs.

In this study, we documented life science graduate students’ definitions of the term “success” and described these students’ experiences related to success within their graduate program. We found that these graduate students had multiple, diverse components within their definitions of success that ranged from academic and career-focused aspects to those that centered on personal values like happiness and resilience.

Previous literature strongly linked cultural and familial backgrounds, socialization, relationships with advisors, and departmental structures to graduate students’ well-being and academic outcomes ( Tinto, 1993 ; Lovitts, 2002 ; Chapdelaine and Alextich, 2004 ; Oh and Kim, 2016 ; Sverdlik et al. , 2018 ). We posited that these factors may also be related to students’ definitions of success and their experiences with success in their program. Indeed, participants described that their definitions of success were most often shaped by their past experiences and family values, and that their relationships with their primary advisors were an integral support to their success during graduate school. Our study also revealed the importance of external supports in the form of friends, significant others, and mental health professionals to students’ perceptions of success. Finally, our study brought to light students’ perceptions of misalignment between their and their advisors’ (or department’s, or institution’s) definitions of success. They clearly articulated an understanding that there was a need to project one set of success definitions while perhaps having a different hidden set, and this had implications for some students in terms of their mental health and sense of belonging. This finding highlights the importance of articulating inclusive definitions of success within academia and providing avenues for future research aimed at diversifying graduate education.

Our data suggest that, while students have their own definitions of success, those definitions are influenced by students’ perceptions of how success “should be” defined within a field (i.e., normative definitions of success). Students’ perceptions of normative definitions are likely shaped by the process of academic socialization (e.g., through interactions with their advisors, faculty members and others). We hypothesize that, if students perceive that their definitions of success are not the same as how success “should be” defined in a field, then these students may experience a reduced sense of belonging. Furthermore, our results suggest that this misalignment affects a number of other outcomes, such as students’ feelings of progress, levels of anxiety, and how students re-evaluate success. We represent these findings in Figure 3 . In this figure, students’ definitions of success are “filtered” through their perceptions of normative definitions of success within their fields, which are impacted by the socialization process. This “filtering” has immediate outcomes, which were experienced by the participants in this study, as well as hypothesized distal effects. These data suggest that widening how success is defined within academia and studying how graduate students perceive and experience the process of socialization may be keys to increasing sense of belonging in graduate programs ( Figure 3 ).

Hypothesized interaction between graduate students’ definitions of success and normative disciplinary definitions and resulting outcomes. Students’ definitions of success are influenced by their perceptions of normative definitions of success within their fields (i.e., how success “should be” defined). Normative definitions are conveyed by implicit and explicit socialization factors such as departmental structures and interactions with faculty. Perceptions of these normative success definitions act as a filter (represented here by a dotted border) that students’ original definitions pass through. Alignment or misalignment of these definitions then potentially results in a number of immediate and distal outcome variables.

Prior research related to student success has mainly focused on understanding and leveraging factors that increase student success within higher education (e.g., Hepworth et al. , 2018 ). However, few studies have centered students’ experiences related to success. We have previously suggested that, without the explicit inclusion of student voice, academic institutions are likely to continue to uphold hegemonic norms that perpetuate unequal persistence of students within higher education ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). Thus, amplifying the voices of graduate students is important to broadening the understanding of the many ways that success can be defined and experienced within STEM higher education.

Graduate Students’ Multiple Definitions of Success

While previous work has investigated undergraduate students’ definitions of success (e.g., Oh and Kim, 2016 ; O’Shea and Delahunty, 2018 ), to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore graduate students’ definitions of success. Every participant in our study had a multifaceted definition of success. Further, no two students had the same definition of success. Students’ definitions included many components; some of these components, like academic success and resilience, are well supported by previous work. For example, work by O’Shea and Delahunty (2018) found that first-generation undergraduate students defined success as “getting through the day with a smile on my face,” among other sentiments related to grit and resilience. This study provides novel descriptions, however, of some components that students included in their definitions of success, like achieving goals or alignment with personal values. Given this diversity in definitions of success, discussions about student success within STEM higher education needs re-evaluation; as our previous work has found, education researchers oftentimes refer to and measure student success as a monolith ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). But our results suggest that these broad generalizations are inappropriate and fail to capture existing nuance within students’ perceptions.

These findings have implications for the metrics graduate programs use to determine graduate students’ success. We believe that broadening metrics of success within graduate education (e.g., to include those that measure students’ development as educators) will better represent graduate students’ unique definitions of success. Furthermore, broader evaluation metrics are more appropriate to exhibit graduate students’ growth within the many roles they occupy within a department. One option would be to have many metrics available in a graduate program, permitting the advisor and student to customize the metrics based on the goals of the student; this would provide a more nuanced way to assess progress of students in programs.

Graduate students exist within a unique educational context, wherein they are not only students, but also act as teachers, researchers, employees, and more ( Winstone and Moore, 2017 ; Reid and Gardner, 2020 ). We think that some participants may prioritize different components of their definitions of success for these different roles. For example, when Hector thought about being an educator, he described success as “using your skill set to bring out the best in everyone around you,” whereas in his role as a researcher, he described success as “crank out six or seven publications, get a bunch of grants, [and] you go get a postdoc somewhere.” This malleability is supported by previous work done on graduate student role identity (e.g., Jazvac-Martek, 2009 ; Winstone and Moore, 2017 ; Reid and Gardner, 2020 ), which has posited that graduate students switch between their multiple roles as they work through the process of identity work (i.e., the process of refining their academic identities; Winstone and Moore, 2017 ). Many components make up students’ academic identities, including students’ perceptions of group membership and social categorization ( Camacho et al. , 2021 ); we posit that an important, yet relatively unstudied aspect is how students’ identities and definitions of success are related to each other.

Misalignments and Conflicts within Students’ Definitions of Success

Given their multiple roles, developing identities, and complex definitions of success, it is not surprising that graduate students in our study faced conflicts and tension among these many factors. Definitions of success, much like role expectations, can develop during the process of socialization. During this process, students may prioritize certain roles and definitions over others, based on explicit and implicit feedback from those around them. Previous work has found clear evidence of conflict between graduate students’ multiple roles ( Fairbrother, 2012 ), and our results show similar conflict between students’ multiple definitions of success. For example, participants felt that one could not be seen as prioritizing both social and academic success. This finding has implications for graduate student persistence, a well-known and extant issue within higher education. Graduate students who perceive conflict among aspects of their definitions of success are likely to feel anxiety in a similar way to those who experience role tension ( Winstone and Moore, 2017 ). Over time, these feelings may act as a “selective pressure” against students with diverse or culturally “other” definitions of success, though this is speculative, and more research is needed in this area.

Beyond the tension that students felt among their own definitions of success, participants also cited tension between how they defined success and how success “should be” defined by scientists in a field. Oftentimes, students described this as feeling that their definitions were “wrong.” Weidman and colleagues ( 2001 ) discuss that the process of graduate student socialization is driven, in part, by advisors and departmental culture. This is supported by our data, which reveal that students often described feeling that their definitions were “wrong” after interactions with their advisors, a member of the department, or even a departmental policy. For example, Dahlia felt that her definition of success, which included factors like happiness and living a life that was aligned with her values, needed to change for her to be a competitive scientist. Her perception was informed by her department’s yearly review, which focused mainly on research productivity and meeting graduate school deadlines; to Dahlia, this was an explicit signal that her definition of success was not correct. Furthermore, students in this study felt strongly influenced by the norms and culture of the department, which they cited as one that was focused on productivity and research over teaching and communication and that set unrealistic standards for graduate student achievement. These implicit norms made participants in this study feel stressed and often had a negative effect on their well-being.

The process of socialization, while integral, often functions to uphold hegemonic power, and thus has important implications for practices and policies in the field of graduate education. Hegemonic power is defined as the power that certain classes in society wield over less powerful classes, often in the form of the manipulation of societal norms, values, and language (i.e., soft power; Gramsci, 1971 ). In our previous work ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ), we discussed how implicit definitions of success are likely to benefit groups that are already in power (i.e., people who are white, male, high socioeconomic status), and how students who do not fit into these categories can often have more diverse definitions of success compared with their colleagues, and thus are more likely to feel “othered” by a narrow definition of success. All of the students in this study had extremely diverse definitions of success, and many of our participants expressed that they did not always feel like they belonged in their department or in their fields. These results support previous work that suggests that misalignments in students’ definitions can lead to downstream effects on student well-being ( Brauer et al. , 2021 ; Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). Our data suggest that advisors and departments must make an effort to understand not only how they are explicitly defining success to graduate students, but also how their departmental culture implicitly condones certain definitions of success, and thus may harm student well-being. We acknowledge, however, that more research on how departments and faculty members define success is needed. Overall, our results suggest that broadening the way that success is viewed within higher education (to include multiple, diverse components of success) is not only important for individual graduate students’ sense of belonging and well-being, but it may also be integral to address systemic structures that function to suppress diversity within the life sciences domain.

Changing Definitions and Metrics over Time

All of the students in our study described some aspect of change in their conceptions of success over time. These changes were in either how students defined success or how students measured success. Only a few students in our study described the latter, where changes occurred in their metrics but not in their definitions. For example, Sal described that at each stage of his career—PhD student, postdoctoral student, professor—his definition of success would stay the same, but the way he measures success would look different. This was conceptually distinct from the idea that definitions themselves changed over time. These results have implications for how advisors discuss goals and success with students, suggesting that students who have unique ways of framing success may need individualized advising, but further research is needed in this area.

When students stated that their definitions of success had changed, the changes often occurred over a relatively long period, for example, over the course of their educational careers. This suggests that students’ definitions of success are relatively malleable and that they are influenced by an accumulation of experiences, much like their identities. For example, Scarlet described how her definition of success had evolved from childhood through her undergraduate and graduate experiences, with particular interactions and moments standing out as having a large impact on her definition. These findings are consistent with the work of Limeri and colleagues (2020 ), which showed that undergraduate students’ definitions of intelligence were highly variable and changed over time. This finding has implications for how student success is measured within a research context; our results suggest that success may not be a stable concept and should thus be surveyed accordingly.

For a handful of students, there was a definite moment that forced them to change the way they defined success—these were often moments of perceived failure. For students in high-stakes, competency-based environments (i.e., graduate school), failure often causes stress, anxiety, and other negative mental health effects ( Artino et al. , 2012 ; Pekrun and Perry, 2014 ). For example, after struggling to present her work, losing an advisor, and having a difficult field season, Dahlia felt defeated. She “took a week to have a breakdown” but then came back with new goals and a new way to define success. Dahlia’s new definition, like those of other participants’ definitions post-failure, was more aligned with her values and felt more “doable” to her. This suggests that failure may be an important part of the process of creating goals and defining success for students and highlights points where students’ mental health may be especially fragile. Many scientists cite failure as an essential part of the learning process and of scientific discovery ( Firestein, 2015 ; Simpson and Maltese, 2017 ; Wylie, 2019 ). Although failure may be essential to the learning process, that does not make failure feel any better; points of failure during a graduate program may be essential times when support from advisors can have an outsized impact on student outcomes ( Barnes et al. , 2010 ; Allen et al. , 2022 ). Many students in our study described their trials through failure, but only some of them were able to look back on the process positively. Those who did often cited a strong support network as well as indicators of a growth mindset. Thus, while it is inconceivable that graduate students will not face failure during their programs, our results suggest that support during graduate school can improve student outcomes and assist students in achieving success.

Limitations

Our study has several limitations to consider when interpreting these results. In accordance with our analysis method, we purposefully sampled one domain (life sciences) at one university and tried to limit our sample size to fewer than 20 participants. This was done to capture a specific group’s perception of the phenomenon in question—success; indeed, IPA studies often try to limit their samples to between 5 and 15 participants in order to find a relatively homogeneous sample, which allows researchers to more finely examine convergence and divergence in participants’ experiences ( Smith et al. , 2009 ). However, and as our data show, these perceptions are impacted by a number of different factors (e.g., sociocultural background, year in the program); thus, the results from this study do not represent a fully comprehensive list of graduate students’ definitions of success or graduate students’ viewpoints.

Participation in our study was voluntary and relied on the experiences of graduate students who were currently enrolled in a graduate program. Thus, it is possible that graduate students who left their programs may have different definitions of success or different experiences with success in their programs that were not captured in our study. Furthermore, our sample was made up entirely of students pursuing a PhD degree, and these students were mostly white, female, and domestic. As a result, we caution against the generalizability of our results beyond the specific context of our sample.

Data in this study were collected from October to December 2020, and this aspect of our research design certainly impacted the results. Contextually, there was a global pandemic during our data-collection period, and participants’ views may have reflected the anxiety, isolation, and other stressors engendered by this pandemic. For example, isolation during the pandemic may have exacerbated a low sense of belonging, which was a factor present in many of our interviews. We are unable to say how much this context influenced the findings of this study, including those related to students’ mental health and their definitions of success.

Finally, our study was limited by our own experiences and biases. We took many steps to address the validity and trustworthiness of our methods (see Validity ). While we have done our due diligence to explore, understand, and bracket our internal biases as they relate to interpreting data, there will always be limitations inherent to a qualitative study that stem from who is interpreting the data.

Recommendations for Practice, Policy, and Research

This study was exploratory in nature; thus, more research is needed to make any broad claims about graduate students’ conceptions of success. However, based on extant literature, we hypothesize that misalignments between graduate students’ definitions of success and their perceptions of normative definitions of success within STEM higher education may have cascading impacts on outcomes such as graduate student persistence, progress toward their degrees, and overall mental health ( Figure 3 ). Given our data and these hypothesized impacts, several recommendations are indicated. We have broken our recommendations down by domain: practice, policy, and research.

Recommendations for Practice.

Our results highlight a number of factors that support student success, including external supports like therapists and coping strategies and engaging in hobbies outside graduate school. As part of the academic socialization process, graduate students should be taught how to use positive coping strategies when they encounter challenges to their success ( Musgrove et al. , 2021 ).

Given that no two graduate students will likely have the same definition of success, we also recommend that advisors and mentors make space for graduate students to share their unique definitions and experiences. As with reconciling graduate students’ multiple roles, we believe that graduate students’ multiple definitions of success should be seen as a key strength, not a flaw. This type of “role integration” is likely to have positive cascading impacts on students’ productivity, well-being, and ultimately their success within graduate school ( Colbeck, 2008 ; O’Meara et al. , 2017 ). Further, given that our results suggest that participants’ feelings of misaligned definitions (in relation to their advisors, department, or field) may be negatively correlated with their sense of belonging and well-being, we recommend that those in power share their own definitions of success with students and discuss how these definitions align. Not only will these conversations allow advisors and mentors to better understand their students’ goals, but they can also foster strong feelings of support in graduate students. Finally, as recommended by Cooper and colleagues ( 2020 ) in their study of students with depression, we concur that faculty must normalize failure and assist students in developing a growth mindset.

Recommendations for Policy.

Results from this study support our previous policy recommendations, such as incorporating broader metrics of success into university evaluation measures and amplifying student voices during the decision-making process ( Weatherton and Schussler, 2021 ). Participants in our study cited many factors that supported their success, and university leaders should consult these results as well as the perceptions of students at their universities to decide where to allocate funding and support. However, we recommend that institutions should broaden their definitions of success based on the perceptions of diverse graduate students, thus shifting power from the more “dominant” party within higher education toward those with less power. Furthermore, faculty members must realize the power that they hold in implicitly socializing graduate students and explore their own biases and preconceptions when it comes to how a field should define success.

Recommendations for Research.

Overall, our study indicates that graduate students, as a population, have unique and valuable perspectives. Thus, we recommend that researchers capitalize on this relatively unstudied population and future work should continue to gather graduate students’ perceptions. Within this work, researchers should more deeply explore graduate students’ perceptions of factors that support their success, as results from these studies can lay the groundwork for practical intervention programs to reduce student attrition. More research is needed to explore how graduate students’ definitions of success vary across demographic and contextual factors, as well as across time. Furthermore, to understand how misalignments in definitions of success emerge, we recommend that more research be done to explore how advisors, faculty members, and departments in life science domains define success. Our results suggest that students’ concepts of “success” may not be stable across time; thus, we recommend that future research should investigate how these definitions shift across students’ academic careers. Furthermore, we encourage researchers to use a wide array of metrics to measure graduate student success and to ensure that their metrics for success align with the perceptions of their study population. Other interesting avenues of exploration include how students’ definitions of success are related to their identities and sense of belonging and how these definitions develop as a process of socialization.

This study explored life science graduate students’ perceptions of success and their experiences with success in their program. We found that graduate students have multiple, diverse definitions of success that are influenced by a wide range of factors. If students felt that their definitions of success were misaligned with their advisors, department, or institution, this often led to intra- and interpersonal tension. Indeed, graduate students in this study often expressed a perception of definitional misalignment in addition to a low sense of belonging within their fields. Overall, the themes discovered in this study suggest that graduate students’ definitions of success are shaped over time, both through their experiences and through the process of professional socialization. Furthermore, our themes suggest that graduate students’ definitions of success are a unique part of their identities and that these definitions may be tied to graduate students’ well-being, perceptions of their program, and future outcomes. To our knowledge, this is the first study that has gathered graduate students’ definitions of success and, as such, lays the foundation for future studies that center student voice and address extant issues related to graduate student mental health and persistence within academia.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the graduate students who made this project possible; we are grateful for your time and your perspectives. Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge Caroline Wienhold, Elizabeth Derryberry, Courtney Faber, Nina Fefferman, Joshua Rosenberg, and Hope Ferguson for their support and feedback at all stages of this project. Many thanks to the Monitoring Editor and reviewers for their helpful feedback.

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Jet propulsion laboratory, building community, tools and skills, interplanetary connections, news media contacts.

At the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interns from Cal State LA are learning key skills studying the origins of life.

What does wastewater management in Los Angeles have to do with the search for life on Mars? Eduardo Martinez certainly didn’t make the connection when he was pursuing a master’s in civil engineering. Not at first. Then his professor pointed him toward an internship opportunity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for astrobiology, the study of life’s origins and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

That professor, Arezoo Khodayari of California State University, Los Angeles, helped Martinez understand the chemistry common to both fields. Soon, Martinez saw that just as phosphorous, nitrogen, and other chemicals in wastewater can fuel algal blooms in the ocean, they can potentially provide energy for microbial life on other planets.

“Once I got a taste of planetary science, I knew I needed more,” said Martinez, who did the internship while finishing his degree at Cal State LA, where more than 70% of students are Latino and few have historically participated in NASA research. “If not for JPL, I would have stopped with my master’s.” Now he’s pursuing a doctorate in geosciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The inspiration that connects both fields lies at the core of a new NASA grant. Khodayari and Laurie Barge, who runs JPL’s Origins and Habitability Laboratory , have received funding for up to six paid JPL internships over two years. The intent is to help develop the next generation of space-minded scientists from the students at Cal State LA.

The grant — one of 11 recently awarded to emerging research universities by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Bridge Program — helps underrepresented students learn more about astrobiology and perform NASA-sponsored research.

“As a large employer in Southern California, we have a duty to invest in our local communities,” Barge said of JPL’s role in the effort. “It makes NASA and its science more accessible to everyone.”

Barge and Khodayari have been informally collaborating for 10 years, designing experiments to try to answer questions in their respective fields. Of the four Cal State LA interns Barge has hosted so far, two — including Martinez — have been lead authors on published research papers.

“It is a great accomplishment to publish in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal, especially as the first author,” Khodayari said. “It’s inspiring to see students from Cal State LA, which is primarily a teaching institution, provided research opportunities that result in these kinds of journal publications.”

She notes that many of her students work multiple jobs, so a paid internship means they can focus entirely on their studies without sacrificing essential income. And, Khodayari added, “they get exposure to a field far from their reality.”

In Barge’s lab, dark, fingerlike mineral structures grow in beakers of cloudy liquid meant to simulate oceans on early Earth — and possibly on other planets. By studying how these structures form in the lab, scientists like Barge hope to learn more about the potential life-creating chemical reactions that take place around similar structures, called chimneys, that develop on the ocean floor around hydrothermal vents .

“We learned so much in Laurie’s lab,” said Erika Flores, Barge’s first Cal State LA intern. “Not only are you working independently on your own projects, you’re collaborating with other interns and even other divisions at JPL.”

The middle of five children, Flores was the first in her family to graduate from high school. She initially attended University of California, Berkeley but felt isolated. After returning home, she earned her bachelor’s degree and began studying with Khodayari at Cal State LA.

Although she decided not to become a planetary scientist – “I considered it, but I didn’t want to spend another five years on a Ph.D.; I was ready to get a job” – Flores credits the JPL internship with helping her overcome a case of impostor syndrome. Equipped with a master’s that she completed during her internship, she now works for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, overseeing 13 pumping plants that route wastewater to treatment plants.

Like Flores, current Cal State LA intern Cathy Trejo wants to improve the world through clean water. She’s studying to be an environmental engineer, with a focus beyond wastewater.

But she was excited to see the parallels between Earth-bound science and planetary science during her internship. Learning to use mass spectrometers has even inspired her. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has a mass spectrometer, the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, that measures the composition of different gases.

“Understanding the instruments we use on Mars has helped me better understand how we study chemistry here on Earth,” Trejo said.

She is fascinated that cumbersome lab instruments can be miniaturized to be taken to other planets, and that scientists are beginning to miniaturize similar instruments that could identify pollutants at Superfund sites.

Barge isn’t giving up hope that Trejo will stick with planetary science, but she’s just happy to help a budding scientist develop. “I hope these student research opportunities offer an appreciation for planetary exploration and how our work at NASA relates to important questions in other fields,” she said.

Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Alise Fisher NASA Headquarters, Washington 301-286-6284 / 202 358-2546 [email protected] / [email protected]

2024-050      

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The science of happiness

First-year students hone more than their research skills by exploring what it means to be happy

What is happiness, and why do we strive for it? Can we become happier? Should we? Is happiness a good thing? 

Dr. Megan McCarthy (PhD ’16)

“ARTS 140 is really focused on becoming critical consumers of information and learning how to organize evidence to make a compelling argument,” McCarthy said.  

McCarthy designed the course to challenge students to think about their beliefs and understanding of happiness, research and test various perspectives on happiness and critically evaluate claims about it.   

But can students — or anyone — separate their personal and intuitive feelings about happiness to examine it critically?  

“I first ask the students to try to write their own definition of happiness,” McCarthy said. “And then they look at different definitions over different eras, fields and in different parts of the world. I get them to reflect on how their definition compares to other conceptions. And then we talk about the roles of empiricism, critical thinking and how looking at data can shape our understanding.”  

Having taught the course every term since 2021, McCarthy has found that, because students often come from different backgrounds, they engage in rich comparative discussions with classmates about their own beliefs and how their experiences led to those beliefs. Through these interactions, the students become “much more accepting of different ways of looking at the subject because they're exposed to different experiences. And they have a lot of fun.”  

I've had students talk to me about how the course has transformed their personal lives. — DR. MEGAN MCCARTHY  (PhD ’16)

As a practice-based course, the students are encouraged to test happiness-boosting claims and then reflect, discuss and evaluate them. In their main project, they even developed their own methods to increase happiness in the community, drawing from their primary research sources and interpretation of evidence.   

Student happiness projects included cooking dinner with their family to increase bonding, making and delivering care packages for unhoused people in the area and organizing a sharing circle in their university residence to reduce stress and enhance social connections.  

One student designed a happiness plan for their workplace after noticing employees weren’t working effectively as a team. They developed a method to strengthen the co-worker community and improve well-being. The student reported that their manager was planning to implement the changes in the workplace in the future.   

“I've had students tell me that the assignments have made them fall in love with research,” McCarthy said. “They get really excited about the process — how to come up with a research question, collect the data and think critically about it.”   

McCarthy sets specific learning outcomes for the course, which include being able to reflect critically on their own cultural experiences that shape how they feel. “I think that one is important because that can be applied across disciplines where they're learning to engage with the ideas and beliefs of others and understand their own assumptions. And I think that can support good relationships and community.”   

Becoming a better researcher is not the only positive outcome of the course. “I hear about it impacting emotional or social well-being,” McCarthy reflected. “I've had students talk to me about how the course has transformed their personal lives. That it has made them happier people, that it has made them think differently about the way they're engaging with and relating to other people. And that's tremendously powerful for me.”  

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The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is co-ordinated within the Office of Indigenous Relations .

• Open access
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Intercultural sensitivity in Chilean healthcare profession students

• Patricia Pineda 1 , 2 ,
• Maura Klenner 3 ,
• Gerardo Espinoza 2 , 4 ,
• Rodrigo Mariño 5 , 6 &
• Carlos Zaror 1 , 2  

BMC Medical Education volume  24 , Article number:  467 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Each culture has unique health care related values, habits, perceptions, expectations, norms, etc., that makes cultural competence an important attribute to be developed by healthcare professionals, to ensure they provide effective treatment. Intercultural sensitivity (IS) is the affective dimension of cultural competence. The objective of this study is to explore the self-perceived level of IS in first and last year students of three health sciences professions (i.e., Dentistry, Medicine, and Nursing) at the Universidad de la Frontera, Temuco, Chile. This study adopted a cross-sectional design and a group comparison (e.g., year of study). 312 students completed the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS). Findings showed that overall ISS scores ranged from 1.83 to 4.94, with a mean score of 4.11 (s.d. 0.43). Group comparison between first and final year students showed statistically significant differences (4.18 vs. 4.00; p  < 0.001). Medical and nursing students had a significantly higher overall mean IS score compared to dental students (4.21 and 4.16, respectively vs. 4.02; p  < 0.01). There were also significant differences between three factors (interaction engagement; interaction confidence; and interaction enjoyment) by healthcare profession. These findings allow for discussion of the need for explicit incorporation and development of cultural competence in on health care professional curricula. Longitudinal research is needed to explore how IS changes over time, along with generating qualitative data from the student populations IS experiences and exposure.

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Within the current trend of globalization and greater population mobility (i.e., migrations) both within and between countries, the importance of cultural diversity constitutes a challenge that healthcare professionals and teams must address as part of their everyday healthcare activities. Different approaches may be required to address healthcare problems of culturally diverse groups compared to mainstream groups [ 1 , 2 ]. Each culture has unique values, habits, perceptions, expectations, norms, etc. about health care, which makes cultural competence of great importance for healthcare professionals [ 3 ]. Although cultural competence is developed in a process, its acquisition must begin during the education of the healthcare professional [ 4 , 5 ].

In the field of healthcare, Cultural Competence (CC) is defined as “a process in which the health care provider continually strives to achieve the ability to work effectively within a patient’s cultural context“ [ 6 ]. Another definition describes CC as the ability to work collaboratively with people who have different cultures and points out that intercultural competence is a construct, which has cognitive, affective and behavioral elements to understand, appreciate, and accept cultural diversity [ 7 ]. Intercultural sensitivity (IS), the affective dimension of intercultural competence, has been described as its main dimension [ 7 ].

Chen and Starosta conceptualized intercultural sensitivity as the “capacity of a person to develop a positive emotion towards the understanding and appreciation of cultural differences that promote appropriate and effective behaviors in intercultural communication” [ 8 ]. People with high levels of IS can provide holistic care to the people they have to care for, have developed elevated levels of moral and ethical sensitivity and complex empathy skills, and are conscious of their own professional responsibilities. An individual who respects cultural diversity has low levels of ethnocentrism, Footnote 1 and as a consequence, shows increased levels of IS [ 9 ].

IS denotes both visibility and affirmation of cultural differences, as well as the rejection of ethnocentric perspectives [ 10 ]. IS contributes to the development of abilities to identify the importance of recognizing, comprehending, and appreciating others in their differences, putting oneself in somebody else’s place in other to in order to access different worldviews [ 11 ].

In any modern society, there are four articulated phenomena that determine the need to teach and display intercultural skills in healthcare: (i) migration; (ii) the different ethnic groups; (iii) cultural diversity; and (iv) the biomedical model inserted in the Western health system [ 1 ]. Furthermore, this scenario of multiculturalism and diversity is also emphasised within each community in terms of rural or urban areas, social, economic, ethnic, and religious differences, among others, which can be challenging for many healthcare professionals. On the one hand, it may be difficult for them to understand the beliefs and healthcare practices of the people they care for and, on the other, they may be concerned about the lack of success in adherence to treatments [ 12 ].

As part of a larger study to help unravel the cultural issues faced by healthcare profession students when treating culturally diverse patients [ 13 ], this study aims to explore the self-perceived level of IS in first and last year students of three health sciences courses (Dentistry, Medicine, and Nursing) at the Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO), Temuco, Chile. The study will establish a baseline for future comparisons. Additionally, the study will explore how cultural competency is influenced by the curriculum as they progress through their health training, using the first and last year as an approximation (proxy) of the length of exposure. These perceptions of IS, together with the review of the cultural challenges faced in implementing healthcare curricula in the context of a diverse patient base [ 13 ], may inform future curricular reviews to fulfil healthcare students’ needs. Furthermore, latest data indicates that 12.8% of the Chilean population declared some First nation identity [ 14 ]. This cultural diversity is increased especially in regions with a high percentage of the population belonging to First nation people such as La Araucanía Region, which stand out for the high percentage of the population that self-identify as belonging to a specific ethnic group (34.3%) [ 14 ].

This study adopted a cross-sectional design and a group comparison (e.g., year of study) to study the IS of Medical, Nursing, and Dental students. Following ethics approval from the UFRO Research Ethics Committee (Ref Nº: 072/19). The study surveyed all first and final year healthcare professions (i.e., Medical, Nursing, and Dental), 18-year-old or older students studying at UFRO, using anonymous self-completed questionnaires, including the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS). These cohorts’ selection allows an approximation (proxy) of length of exposure to explore the development of students’ IS over time. Data were collected between June 2021 and April 2022.

The Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS) is a self-report scale that has been extensively used in different areas to assess the development of IS [ 8 ]. ISS assesses intercultural sensitivity as the affective dimension of intercultural competence. The theoretical structure of this scale was based on five dimensions, namely: interaction engagement; respect for cultural differences; interaction confidence; interaction enjoyment; and interaction attentiveness, as shown in Appendix 1. ISS is a 24-item scale organised in a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = neutral; 4 = agree; 5 = strongly agree). Some items are coded reversely in the scale. Negative questions were reversed to calculate the ISS score. Scale scores range from ‘1’, the lowest to ‘5’, the highest. There is not a cut-off value of the scale. A high score indicates higher intercultural sensitivity [ 15 ]. The ISS was linguistically adapted and validated to be used in the Chilean context [ 11 ].

Due to the COVID 19 restrictions, the instrument was redesigned to be completed online. All first and final year students were briefed about the objectives of the study and invited to participate. Participants were requested to complete the online questionnaire anonymously, using a self-assigned code. Data collection was done via the QuestionPRo platform [ 15 ].

Apart from the variables of age, sex, year of study (first and last of each course), and course (medicine, dentistry, or nursing), region of residence (out of the 16 Regions in which Chile is divided administratively, categorised as ‘ Araucania’; ‘Los Lagos’; ‘Bio-Bio’; and ‘Other’). Students’ ethnicity was also collected (Broad Chilean; Mapuche; and Other). Participants’ family group income was determined using seven monthly income levels in Chilean pesos (‘$300,000 or less’; ‘$300,001 to $600,000’; ‘$600,001 to $1,000,000’; ‘$1,000,001 to $1,500,000’; ‘$1,500,001 to $2,000,000’;’$2,000,001 to $3,000,000’; and ‘More than $3,000,000’). Participants were also asked about the type of secondary education. Secondary education in Chile has three types funding: ‘Private’; ‘Publicly subsidized private’; and ‘Municipal’. Municipal funds focus on lower socio-economic status (SES) individuals, while private education generally covers those in higher SES groups [ 16 ].

The dependent variable represented by the overall IS score and eight socio-demographic and study variables were included in the analysis. Five intercultural sensitivity scores were computed by calculating average responses across the five intercultural sensitivity dimensions. Additionally, an overall intercultural sensitivity score was computed by calculating average responses across all the five intercultural sensitivity factors.

The statistical analysis describes the distribution of the socio-demographic and study variables. To examine whether any independent variables (e.g., year of study) had the same pattern of ISS mean, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) (continuous measures) were employed. A significant ANOVA was followed by post-hoc comparisons using Tukey’s Honestly Significant Differences (HSD) tests. To explore associations between nominal and ordinal variables (e.g., sex and year of education), chi square analysis was applied. To test if any combination of the various socio- demographic, and study variables, provided a multivariate explanation of the IS score, a linear regression model was fitted using a stepwise selection method. Variables included in the regression model were based on a combination of factors, including the theoretical framework the study, and the literature. However, variables in the final model were retained on statistical criteria. A probability value of 0.05 or smaller was considered to be statistically significant. Data manipulation and analyses were conducted using SPSS PC (Version 27.0).

Four hundred and nineteen students were invited to participate in the survey, with 210 in the first year and 209 in the last year of their course. The overall response rates were 93.8% and 55%, respectively. Among those who completed the survey, 312 cases were included in the analysis after excluding six incomplete forms. Of those, there were 105 nursing students: 76 (response rate: 100%) were in the first year and 29 in the final (response rate: 49.2%) year; and 143 dental students: 68 in first year (response rate: 97.1%) and 75 in the final year (response rate: 100%). There were also 64 medical students: 53 in the first year (response rate: 74.6%) and 11 students in the final year of their studies (response rate: 13.8%).

The mean age of participants was 23.1 (s.d. 3.3) years, and most of them were females, accounting for 68.7%. Publicly subsidized private schooling was the most common type of secondary education among students (54.8%), followed by public schooling (33.0%). The remaining 12.2% attend non-subsidized private schools. Most participants were from the La Araucania Region (77.5%), followed by the Los Lagos Region (7.4%), and Bio-Bio Region (6.4%). The remaining participants were from other 10 Regions (8.7%). With regard to ethnic background, the majority self-identified as without any cultural group different to broad Chilean (78.3%), and 20.7% ( n  = 65) self-identified with another culture. The majority of these (86.3%) as Mapuche people and 7.5% as other cultures. The remaining 6.2% did not specify their ethnicity. Table  1 presents the distribution of students by socio-demographic and study characteristics.

The overall ISS scores ranged from 1.83 to 4.94, with a mean score of 4.11 (s.d. 0.43). The mean scores by subscales were as follows; 4.17 (s.d. 0.53) in the interaction engagement subscale; 4.52 (s.d. 0.51) in the respect for cultural differences subscale; 3.66 (s.d. 0.69) in the subscale of interaction confidence; 4.44 (s.d. 0.58); in the interaction enjoyment subscale, and 3.78 (0.65) in the interaction attentiveness subscale (Table  2 ). Overall, there were statistically significantly differences when comparing first and final year’s ISS scores (4.18 vs. 4.00; p  < 0.001). Differences by healthcare profession were also evident. Medical and nursing students had a significantly higher overall mean ISS score compared to dental students (4.21 and 4.16, respectively vs. 4.02; p  < 0.01). No significant associations were found in the ISS by ethnic group, by Region, by sex, or by type of secondary education.

By ISS dimension, except for dental students, within each profession there were significant differences between the first and final year (See Table  2 ). Furthermore, there were also significant differences between three factors (i.e., interaction engagement; interaction confidence; and interaction enjoyment) by course. However, only medical students reached significance levels with the overall score by year (4.29 vs. 3.86 p  < 0.001).

There were also statistically different ISS scores between the first-year student cohorts (i.e., nursing compared with dental). First year nursing and medical students scored higher than dental students (4.20 and 4.29, respectively vs. 4.06; p  < 0.05). On the other hand, when scores from final year students were compared, there were no significant differences (Table  2 ).

To better understand the variance in the overall ISS score, eight socio-demographic and course variables (age, sex, income, type of education, region of residence, profession, cultural background, and year of study), were entered into a multiple linear regression model. However, age was dropped from the model because of high collinearity with the year of study variable. The final model had two significant variables (i.e., course, and year of study) [F(2,294) = 8.411 p  < 0.001]. The resulting model indicated that, after controlling for other independent variables in the model, those who had the highest IS score were first year students not studying dentistry. The variance accounted for, using the full model, was 5.4% (adjusted R 2  = 0.054) (See Table  3 ).

A fundamental element to achieve Intercultural competence is the development of intercultural sensitivity [ 7 ]. This is the first Chilean study to explore the level of IS which may be required to safely handle culturally diverse health situations. This study reports on the measure of healthcare students’ level of IS. Present findings would indicate that, across all healthcare professions, students tended to exhibit lower levels of self-reported IS in the final year of their studies compared to the first year. It has been reported that explicit instruction on IS in curricula is required to prompt this aspect of CC in healthcare [ 17 ]. As it was reported in other manuscript pertaining to this research [ 13 ], it was found that the sample reported on this study had been exposed to a more traditional biomedical approach in their professional formative process, which did not include the development of CC in a consistent and explicit manner across the curricula of the three programs but is developed in a more tangential mode. Alternative explanations for the decreasing IS levels may be that first-year students had been more exposed to intercultural encounters during their secondary education before entering university around 2020, due to the increasing immigration waves into the country prior to the COVID-19 pandemic [ 18 ].

Intercultural competence can be developed early through schooling processes [ 19 ] In Australia, newly graduated dental practitioners, when surveyed about their training in cultural competence, said that the current curricula did not focus enough on cultural issues and that additional training would be of benefit [ 20 ]. Furthermore, some of them indicated that most of their cultural and social perceptions evolved from their upbringing, high school and primary school education, and past personal experiences, rather than from exposure to the dental curriculum [ 20 ]. This introduces the influence of socio-demographics, personalities, experiences, and other factors. On the other hand, final year students may have had fewer formative opportunities to develop intercultural competencies due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns starting at the time they were about to start immersing their placements, internships, and clinical work. This, in turn, may have affected their IS.

In the present study, dental students reported lower IS scores compared to nursing and medical counterparts. This is consistent with previous publications from this study, which reports that the dentistry curriculum showed the majority of CC related themes are treated mainly at emerging and intermediate depths of coverage [ 13 ].

This study also revealed that students from La Araucanía, where this university is located, and students who report being Mapuche, do not obtain higher levels of IS. High levels of IS have been linked to multicultural societies in which cultural diversity is socially and institutionally accepted and appreciated [ 21 ]. Although La Araucanía Region has the country’s largest proportion of First Nations people, it has been recognized as the center of historical struggles between the Chilean State and First Nations people, particularly Mapuche people, for the recognition and incorporation of an intercultural view in national policies [ 22 ]. This situation might affect the general population’s IS levels, since the concept of interculturality could be related to social discontent. However, the majority of the students were from contiguous regions (i.e., Los Lagos, Bio-Bio). Therefore, this hypothesis may require further exploration.

The lack of significant difference in IS scores between those students who self-reported Mapuche ancestry and those who did not, questions the concept of ethnic and cultural equivalence of higher education students and may suggest that before or during the process of professionalization there is a common cultural profile to which the majority of students subscribed [ 4 ]. This calls for the examination of a critical question: Are healthcare profession students embedded in a cultural system, defined by their ancestries, or are there universal characteristics that are unique to healthcare profession students? This remains an unanswered empirical question which would need to be answered with further studies. However, it is also possible that the IS instrument loses cultural equivalence when applied to different ethnocultural populations [ 23 ].

Although the study reached an overall response rate higher than expected (i.e., 60%) [ 24 ], limitations of the study include low response rates, particularly, the final year medical students’ responses, relative to the size of the final year medical student population, and to a lesser extent the low response rate for last year nursing students. The invitation to participate was sent during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Chile, which may have contributed to low response rates. On the other hand, low response rates are not unexpected in online surveys. Response rates to online surveys about oral health are within the range of 2.5–26% [ 25 , 26 ].

Another limitation was the self-reported nature of the responses, which may not be an accurate reflection of the actual students’ IS [ 27 , 28 ]. Furthermore, the cross-sectional nature of this study precludes a strong conclusion about IS exposure to healthcare professional education, or the use of year of study as a proxy for years of exposure to opportunities to develop sensitization to issues of cultural diversity during professional training. Another concern is that participants were students at one university (i.e., UFRO) only. As a result, conclusions drawn from this study may not be representative of the IS of all Chilean healthcare profession students [ 29 ].

Thus, it is not implied that a final definitive model of IS among Chilean healthcare profession students has been developed, rather his study raises some factors to be investigated in the future. Nonetheless, despite its limitations, we believe that the current approach was adequate given the exploratory nature of the study. The primary goal of this study was to describe the perceptions of IS among healthcare professions students. The present results show consistent findings with a qualitative review of the healthcare professions curricula at UFRO [ 13 ]. Together, these efforts provide robust evidence about the need to upsurge formative experiences to increase students’ awareness and experience to provide a culturally safe encounter when treating a patient from a culture different to the student’s own.

Research involving the collection of longitudinal data is needed to explore how IS changes over time. Future studies should also involve qualitative data collection from student populations’ IS experiences and exposure. This analysis would generate opportunities for a broader understanding of their intercultural sensitivity, experience, and other contextual issues. Additionally, cooperation with other dental, medical, and nursing schools/Faculties in Chile or overseas would be beneficial in confirming the present results and understanding the influence of IS education on students as the future health workforce.

Against a background of increased international mobility and recognition of indigenous nations within the territory, there is a growing interest in Chile in reviewing the extent to which cultural competence is covered in the healthcare professions curricula to meet the standards and expectations of accreditation organizations [ 30 , 31 ]. While this approach is still incipient, from this perspective, this research is significant because it is among the few to comparatively examine and document IS among healthcare profession students in Chile. This information is central to developing educational programs for the future health workforce. It is also expected that the findings of this project will assist in the development of accreditation standards, policies, and professional competencies for healthcare professionals.

Data availability

Ethics approval was granted on the basis that only researchers involved in the study and could access the de-identified data. The minimum retention period is 5 years from publication. Supporting documents are available upon request to the corresponding author.

Ethnocentrism involves a tendency to evaluate and judge other cultures based on the standards and values of one’s own culture, resulting in a biased interpretation and understanding of other cultures. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ethnocentric . Accessed 20 Mar. 2024.

Abbreviations

One-way analysis of variance

Socio-economic status

Universidad de La Frontera

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Acknowledgements

The submitted manuscript is part of the IAF project N° 19 − 0006 ‘Competencias transculturales de los currículos del área de la salud’ funded by the Dirección de Investigación de la Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco, Chile.

This study received University of La Frontera internal funding from the Dirección de Investigación de la Universidad de La Frontera, IAF 2019 scheme (Ref: IAF N° 19 − 0006). The University of La Frontera acts as a funding body only and will not interfere in any way in the research or influence its outcomes. The researchers will keep, at all times, their independence and autonomy.

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MK: Participated in the conception and design of the study, as well as drafting of the manuscript and its critical revision, read and approval of the final version. PP: Participated in the conception and design of the study; as well as critical revision of the manuscript, read and approval of the final version. RM: Participated in the conception and design of the study, as well as drafting of the manuscript and its critical revision, read and approval of the final version. CZ: Participated in the conception and design of the study; as well as critical revision of the manuscript, read and approval of the final version. GE: Participated in the conception and design of the study; as well as critical revision of the manuscript, read and approval of the final version.

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Pineda, P., Klenner, M., Espinoza, G. et al. Intercultural sensitivity in Chilean healthcare profession students. BMC Med Educ 24 , 467 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05443-w

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Received : 23 June 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05443-w

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