Public health emergencies such as the outbreak of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) are stressful times. Everybody is strained in some way during this testing time thus no-one would deny students of their right to worry over their academic ambitions. University students need to be resilient, but can their research efforts withstand this strain? What will it…

Undergraduate dissertation students' cognitive appraisal, coping styles and perceived stress were examined at three time points during their undergraduate dissertation projects (UDP), observing whether cognitive appraisal and coping styles predicted perceived stress and their temporal changes. Sixty-four dissertation students completed the…

Practice-Based Learning Days (PBLDs) account for approximately one-third of the total university-lead days on Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP) training courses. In this article, I consider a number of challenges facing teachers of PWPs and describe a recent attempt to respond to these challenges by restructuring the content of our PBLDs…

The Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology (DARTP) hosted a symposium at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference 2018, at which the concepts of transition and adaptability were explored within the context of higher and pre-tertiary education and in academic organisational contexts. The talks and discussions…

This paper presents a model of the challenges facing undergraduates transitioning to taught postgraduate studies developed from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with current and prospective taught postgraduates from a range of psychology programmes. The model reveals the importance of the visibility of current and recently taught…

This paper overviewed some of the research that had already been conducted in schools to support student wellbeing and reported back on research that the author had conducted in her own school, evaluating an intervention that aimed to help Year 12 students cope better with stress. The results showed a small but significant improvement in students'…

Independent study can be satisfying and thrilling, and it can also be terrifying. Some students may not be equipped to handle the stress that University life puts in front of them. It is a fact that 75 per cent of adult mental health problems begin before the age of 18 (Davies, 2013) therefore, some students will enter University with a mental…

As a fundamental element of any psychology degree, the teaching and learning of research methods is repeatedly brought into sharp focus, and it is often regarded as a real challenge by undergraduate students. The reasons for this are complex, but frequently attributed to an aversion of maths. To gain a more detailed understanding of students'…

Adverse life experiences have been linked with a wide range of negative outcomes. However, despite being exposed to adversity, individuals who exhibit high levels of resilience appear to be less impacted by adversity, and continue to function normally. Using self-report measures and a sample of 161 participants aged between 16 and 21, the present…

The aim was to explore the relationship between sources of stress and a range of coping behaviours on student satisfaction and motivation. Most research exploring sources of stress construes stress as distress, with little attempt to consider positive, good stress or "eustress" experiences. A cohort of first-year psychology students…