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Research student in british english.

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What Is CUR’s Definition of Undergraduate Research?

Undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative inquiry is fundamentally a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning. With an emphasis on process, CUR defines undergraduate research as: A mentored investigation or creative inquiry conducted by undergraduates that seeks to make a scholarly or artistic contribution to knowledge. 

What Are the Benefits of Undergraduate Research?

• Enhances student learning through mentoring relationships with faculty
• Increases retention and graduation in academic programs
• Increases enrollment in graduate education and provides effective career preparation
• Develops critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and intellectual independence
• Develops an understanding of research methodology
• Promotes an innovation-oriented culture
• Develops competencies that speak to career-readiness

How Does CUR Support Undergraduate Research?

CUR, incorporated in 1980, is an organization of individual, institutional, and affiliate members from around the world. CUR members share a focus on providing high-quality and collaborative undergraduate research, scholarly, and creative activity opportunities for faculty and students. CUR believes that faculty members enhance their teaching and contribution to society by remaining active in research and by involving undergraduates in research and that students engaged in undergraduate research succeed in their studies and professional advancement.

Among the many activities and networking opportunities that CUR provides, the organization also offers support for the professional growth of faculty and administrators through expert-designed institutes, conferences, and a wide range of volunteer positions. The CUR community continues to provide a platform for discussion and other resources related to mentoring, connecting, and creating relationships centered around undergraduate research. CUR’s advocacy efforts are also a large portion of its work as we strive to strengthen support for undergraduate research. Its continued growth in connections with representatives, private foundations, government agencies, and campuses worldwide provides value to its members and gives voice to undergraduate research.

CUR is committed to inclusivity and diversity in all its activities and our community.

We are your resource. We are the community. We are mentoring. We are CUR.

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Definition of research

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of research  (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

intransitive verb

• disquisition
• examination
• exploration
• inquisition
• investigation
• delve (into)
• inquire (into)
• investigate
• look (into)

Examples of research in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'research.' 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 French recerche , from recercher to go about seeking, from Old French recerchier , from re- + cerchier, sercher to search — more at search

1577, in the meaning defined at sense 3

1588, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 1

Phrases Containing research

• marketing research
• market research
• operations research
• oppo research

research and development

• research park
• translational research

Dictionary Entries Near research

Cite this entry.

“Research.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/research. Accessed 6 Jun. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of research.

Kids Definition of research  (Entry 2 of 2)

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Meaning of research in English

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• He has dedicated his life to scientific research.
• He emphasized that all the people taking part in the research were volunteers .
• The state of Michigan has endowed three institutes to do research for industry .
• I'd like to see the research that these recommendations are founded on.
• It took months of painstaking research to write the book .
• absorptive capacity
• dream something up
• modularization
• nanotechnology
• technologist
• the mother of something idiom
• think outside the box idiom
• think something up
• study What do you plan on studying at university?
• major US She majored in philosophy at Harvard.
• cram She's cramming for her history exam.
• revise UK I'm revising for tomorrow's test.
• review US We're going to review for the test tomorrow night.
• research Scientists are researching possible new treatments for cancer.
• The amount of time and money being spent on researching this disease is pitiful .
• We are researching the reproduction of elephants .
• She researched a wide variety of jobs before deciding on law .
• He researches heart disease .
• The internet has reduced the amount of time it takes to research these subjects .
• adjudication
• have the measure of someone/something idiom
• interpretable
• interpretive
• reinspection
• reinterpret
• reinterpretation
• reinvestigate
• reinvestigation

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any of the rods that join the edge of a wheel to its centre, so giving the wheel its strength

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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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Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think

For decades, there has been evidence that classroom techniques designed to get students to participate in the learning process produces better educational outcomes at virtually all levels.

And a new Harvard study suggests it may be important to let students know it.

The study , published Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that, though students felt as if they learned more through traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in classrooms that employed so-called active-learning strategies.

Lead author Louis Deslauriers , the director of science teaching and learning and senior physics preceptor, knew that students would learn more from active learning. He published a key study in Science in 2011 that showed just that. But many students and faculty remained hesitant to switch to it.

“Often, students seemed genuinely to prefer smooth-as-silk traditional lectures,” Deslauriers said. “We wanted to take them at their word. Perhaps they actually felt like they learned more from lectures than they did from active learning.”

In addition to Deslauriers, the study is authored by director of sciences education and physics lecturer Logan McCarty , senior preceptor in applied physics Kelly Miller, preceptor in physics Greg Kestin , and Kristina Callaghan, now a physics lecturer at the University of California, Merced.

The question of whether students’ perceptions of their learning matches with how well they’re actually learning is particularly important, Deslauriers said, because while students eventually see the value of active learning, initially it can feel frustrating.

“Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning,” he said. “On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.”

To understand that dichotomy, Deslauriers and his co-authors designed an experiment that would expose students in an introductory physics class to both traditional lectures and active learning.

For the first 11 weeks of the 15-week class, students were taught using standard methods by an experienced instructor. In the 12th week, half the class was randomly assigned to a classroom that used active learning, while the other half attended highly polished lectures. In a subsequent class, the two groups were reversed. Notably, both groups used identical class content and only active engagement with the material was toggled on and off.

Following each class, students were surveyed on how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I feel like I learned a lot from this lecture” and “I wish all my physics courses were taught this way.” Students were also tested on how much they learned in the class with 12 multiple-choice questions.

When the results were tallied, the authors found that students felt as if they learned more from the lectures, but in fact scored higher on tests following the active learning sessions. “Actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated,” Deslauriers said, “as shown through the robust statistical analysis by co-author Kelly Miller, who is an expert in educational statistics and active learning.”

Those results, the study authors are quick to point out, shouldn’t be interpreted as suggesting students dislike active learning. In fact, many studies have shown students quickly warm to the idea, once they begin to see the results. “In all the courses at Harvard that we’ve transformed to active learning,” Deslauriers said, “the overall course evaluations went up.”

Co-author Kestin, who in addition to being a physicist is a video producer with PBS’ NOVA, said, “It can be tempting to engage the class simply by folding lectures into a compelling ‘story,’ especially when that’s what students seem to like. I show my students the data from this study on the first day of class to help them appreciate the importance of their own involvement in active learning.”

McCarty, who oversees curricular efforts across the sciences, hopes this study will encourage more of his colleagues to embrace active learning.

“We want to make sure that other instructors are thinking hard about the way they’re teaching,” he said. “In our classes, we start each topic by asking students to gather in small groups to solve some problems. While they work, we walk around the room to observe them and answer questions. Then we come together and give a short lecture targeted specifically at the misconceptions and struggles we saw during the problem-solving activity. So far we’ve transformed over a dozen classes to use this kind of active-learning approach. It’s extremely efficient — we can cover just as much material as we would using lectures.”

A pioneer in work on active learning, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur hailed the study as debunking long-held beliefs about how students learn.

“This work unambiguously debunks the illusion of learning from lectures,” he said. “It also explains why instructors and students cling to the belief that listening to lectures constitutes learning. I recommend every lecturer reads this article.”

Dean of Science Christopher Stubbs , Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, was an early convert. “When I first switched to teaching using active learning, some students resisted that change. This research confirms that faculty should persist and encourage active learning. Active engagement in every classroom, led by our incredible science faculty, should be the hallmark of residential undergraduate education at Harvard.”

Ultimately, Deslauriers said, the study shows that it’s important to ensure that neither instructors nor students are fooled into thinking that lectures are the best learning option. “Students might give fabulous evaluations to an amazing lecturer based on this feeling of learning, even though their actual learning isn’t optimal,” he said. “This could help to explain why study after study shows that student evaluations seem to be completely uncorrelated with actual learning.”

This research was supported with funding from the Harvard FAS Division of Science.

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

Saira hossain.

School of Education, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, 2052 Australia

Sue O’Neill

Iva strnadová.

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.

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:

• i. How has student well-being been conceptualised in previous studies?
• ii. What approaches have been taken to measure student well-being?
• iii. 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.

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 ​ Table1 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.

Examples of Search Terms

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 ).

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 ​ Table2). 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

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

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.

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.

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 ).

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 ​ Table3). 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 ).

Overview of the Studies Included in the Scoping Review

European countries dominated the research location from the 33 studies included in the analysis, accounting for 18 out of the 33 studies (see Table ​ Table3). 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.

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 ​ Table3). 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.

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 ​ Table4). 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.

Different Approaches to Conceptualise Student well-being in the Reviewed Studies

A hedonic view was evident in 16 of the 33 studies (See Table ​ Table4). 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 ​ Table4). 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 ​ Table4). 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 ​ Table4). 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.

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 ​ Table5). 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.

Coding scheme to recategorise domains derived from student well-being studies

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.

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 ​ Table6). 6 ). School satisfaction was the most measured aspect of positive emotion, regardless of how it was labelled.

Domains Inferred from 33 Studies on Student Well-being

(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 ​ Table6). 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.

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 ​ Table6). 6 ). Under this domain, we included school connectedness, teacher-student, and peer-peer relationships (see Table ​ Table5 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.

This domain included behavioural, cognitive, and affective involvement with the school and was evident in 14 out of 33 studies (see Table ​ Table6). 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.

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.

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 ​ Table5 5 for the coding scheme).

Intrapersonal/Internal Factors

About 10 of the 33 studies included this domain (see Table ​ Table6). 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 ​ Table6). 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.

Contextual/ External Factors

This domain was included in 6 of the 33 studies (see Table ​ Table6). 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 ​ Table5 5 for the coding scheme). Soutter’s ( 2011 ) Having domain was included here as it referred to access to opportunity, tools, and resources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Declarations

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Contributor Information

Saira Hossain, Email: [email protected] .

Sue O’Neill, Email: [email protected] .

Iva Strnadová, Email: [email protected] .

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Definition of research noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• scientific/medical/academic research
• They are raising money for cancer research.
• to do/conduct/undertake research
• I've done some research to find out the cheapest way of travelling there.
• research into something He has carried out extensive research into renewable energy sources.
• research on something/somebody Recent research on deaf children has produced some interesting findings about their speech.
• Research on animals has led to some important medical advances.
• according to research According to recent research, more people are going to the movies than ever before.
• Their latest research project will be funded by the government.
• Are you hoping to get a research grant ?
• a research fellow/assistant/scientist
• a research institute/centre/laboratory
• The research findings were published in the Journal of Environmental Quality.
• formulate/​advance a theory/​hypothesis
• build/​construct/​create/​develop a simple/​theoretical/​mathematical model
• develop/​establish/​provide/​use a theoretical/​conceptual framework
• advance/​argue/​develop the thesis that…
• explore an idea/​a concept/​a hypothesis
• make a prediction/​an inference
• base a prediction/​your calculations on something
• investigate/​evaluate/​accept/​challenge/​reject a theory/​hypothesis/​model
• design an experiment/​a questionnaire/​a study/​a test
• do research/​an experiment/​an analysis
• make observations/​measurements/​calculations
• carry out/​conduct/​perform an experiment/​a test/​a longitudinal study/​observations/​clinical trials
• run an experiment/​a simulation/​clinical trials
• repeat an experiment/​a test/​an analysis
• replicate a study/​the results/​the findings
• observe/​study/​examine/​investigate/​assess a pattern/​a process/​a behaviour
• fund/​support the research/​project/​study
• seek/​provide/​get/​secure funding for research
• collect/​gather/​extract data/​information
• yield data/​evidence/​similar findings/​the same results
• analyse/​examine the data/​soil samples/​a specimen
• consider/​compare/​interpret the results/​findings
• fit the data/​model
• confirm/​support/​verify a prediction/​a hypothesis/​the results/​the findings
• prove a conjecture/​hypothesis/​theorem
• draw/​make/​reach the same conclusions
• read/​review the records/​literature
• describe/​report an experiment/​a study
• present/​publish/​summarize the results/​findings
• present/​publish/​read/​review/​cite a paper in a scientific journal
• a debate about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research
• For his PhD he conducted field research in Indonesia.
• Further research is needed.
• Future research will hopefully give us a better understanding of how garlic works in the human body.
• Dr Babcock has conducted extensive research in the area of agricultural production.
• the funding of basic research in biology, chemistry and genetics
• Activists called for a ban on animal research.
• Work is under way to carry out more research on the gene.
• She returned to Jamaica to pursue her research on the African diaspora.
• Bad punctuation can slow down people's reading speeds, according to new research carried out at Bradford University.
• He focused his research on the economics of the interwar era.
• Most research in the field has concentrated on the effects on children.
• One paper based on research conducted at Oxford suggested that the drug may cause brain damage.
• Research demonstrates that women are more likely than men to provide social support to others.
• She's doing research on Czech music between the wars.
• The research does not support these conclusions.
• They are carrying out research into the natural flow patterns of water.
• They lack the resources to do their own research.
• What has their research shown?
• Funding for medical research has been cut quite dramatically.
• a startling piece of historical research
• pioneering research into skin disease
• They were the first to undertake pioneering research into the human genome.
• There is a significant amount of research into the effects of stress on junior doctors.
• He's done a lot of research into the background of this story.
• research which identifies the causes of depression
• spending on military research and development
• the research done in the 1950s that linked smoking with cancer
• The children are taking part in a research project to investigate technology-enabled learning.
• The Lancet published a research paper by the scientist at the centre of the controversy.
• Who is directing the group's research effort?
• She is chief of the clinical research program at McLean Hospital.
• James is a 24-year-old research student from Iowa.
• You will need to describe your research methods.
• Before a job interview, do your research and find out as much as you can about the company.
• Most academic research is carried out in universities.
• This is a piece of research that should be taken very seriously.
• This is an important area of research.
• There's a large body of research linking hypertension directly to impaired brain function.
• In the course of my researches, I came across some of my grandfather's old letters.
• demonstrate something
• find something
• identify something
• programme/​program
• research in
• research into
• research on
• an area of research
• focus your research on something
• somebody’s own research

Questions about grammar and vocabulary?

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• the National Research Council
• operations research
• Medical Research Council

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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 : 

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What is Research Students

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Honors student produces prize-winning research on loneliness

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In her honors thesis, recent graduate Amber Duffy describes how loneliness influences a person’s ability to respond to stress

Amber Duffy, who graduated last semester magna cum laude , didn’t always plan to write an honor’s thesis.

She came to the University of Colorado Boulder on a pre-med track, studying neuroscience, but an introductory psychology class knocked her off that path and inspired her to change her major.  

“I really liked the behavioral aspect of psychology,” she says.

She liked psychology so much, in fact, that she wasn’t content simply to study it. She wanted to contribute to it. “If I’m not going to do medical school anymore,” she remembers thinking, “I should delve into research.”

Recent psychology and neuroscience graduate Amber Duffy won the the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, recognizing her research on loneliness.

She contacted Erik Knight , a CU Boulder assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, with whom she’d taken a class her sophomore year, and he invited her to join his lab . She ended up working there for two years, during which time she decided to write an honor’s thesis.

The topic? Loneliness and its effect on young adults’ stress responses.

Why loneliness?  

Duffy’s interest in loneliness isn’t purely academic. Many of her friends and family have struggled with it for years, even before the pandemic, she says. And she herself, the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and a Pennsylvanian father, has often felt its sting.  

“Growing up in a multicultural family in my predominantly white town”—Castle Rock, Colorado—“it was hard for me to connect with people sometimes,” she says. “I would learn about my mom’s culture at home and then go to school or talk with friends, and they just didn’t understand how I lived.”

Her concerns over loneliness only increased when she learned of Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s warning that the United States is suffering from a loneliness epidemic.

“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” Murthy states.  

Hearing this spurred Duffy to action. She wanted to contribute to the fight against loneliness and its potentially negative consequences.

“If we expand our knowledge of loneliness,” she says, “maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

More gas, less brakes

For her honors experiment, Duffy gathered 51 CU Boulder undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 34 and divided them randomly into a control condition and an experimental condition. Those in the former provided a low-stress comparison to those in the latter, who were put through the wringer.

First, the subjects in the experimental condition had to interview for a high-stakes job Duffy and Knight had concocted specifically for the study.

“We told them, in the moment, ‘You have five minutes to prepare a five-minute speech on why you’re the perfect applicant,’” says Duffy.

Immediately following that, subjects had to solve subtraction problems for five minutes, out loud, perfectly, starting at 6,233 and going down from there in increments of 13. “If they made a mistake,” says Duffy, “they had to start over.”

While the subjects ran these gauntlets, Duffy monitored their heart-rate variability (HRV), or the change in interval between heartbeats, and their pre-ejection period (PEP), or the time it takes for a heart to prepare to push blood to the rest of the body. Both serve as indicators of how a person’s stress-response system is functioning, Duffy explains. 

Finally, when the stress tests were done, the subjects completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 questionnaire, which research has found to be a reliable means of measuring loneliness.

Duffy had hypothesized that lonelier subjects would have more pronounced stress responses than less lonely subjects, and indeed that’s what her data revealed.

Lonelier subjects had higher heartrates, stronger responses from their sympathetic nervous systems (SNS) and weaker responses from their parasympathetic nervous systems (PNS). Duffy likens the SNS, which controls the fight-or-flight response, to a car’s gas pedal and the PNS, which counterbalances the SNS, to a car’s brakes.

When met with stressful situations, then, lonelier individuals had more gas and less brakes, which Duffy says could have long-term health implications.

Yet she is also quick to point out that more research needs to be done, preferably with more subjects.

If we expand our knowledge of loneliness, maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

“We only had 51 people. An increase in sample size would help with more reliable data,” she says. “It’s also important to look at more clinical and diverse populations because there are other factors that could affect loneliness levels.” 

Posters, prizes and professorships

Duffy submitted an abstract of her research to The Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, where she hoped to present a poster, thinking this would be a nice, low-key way of getting some conference experience under her belt.

Her abstract was accepted. But then a conference organizer asked her if, in addition to presenting a poster, she could also give a fifteen-minute talk. She would be the only undergraduate at the conference to do so.

Duffy balked. The thought of speaking to a roomful of PhDs intimidated her. “Most of my life I’ve heard how cutthroat academia is,” she says. But she ultimately agreed, and she was glad she did.

Her talk and poster presentation went so well that not only did she receive interest and encouragement from several doctoral programs, but she also won an award that she didn’t even know existed: the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award.

“In the middle of my poster presentation, a woman came up to me—I didn’t know who she was—and said, ‘I have a check here for you for $500.’ I didn’t know that was supposed to happen, but it was great!”

Now graduated, Duffy isn’t 100% sure what her next steps will be, but she’s leaning toward one day pursuing a PhD. 

“When you get a PhD, you get to do research and also work with students,” she says. “I think it would be fun to be a professor and give back in that way.”

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• 31 May 2024

What is science? Tech heavyweights brawl over definition

• Fred Schwaller

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X owner Elon Musk (left) and artificial-intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun sparred on the social-media platform about scientific publications. Credit: Slaven Vlasic/Getty for The New York Times, Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg via Getty

If you do research and don’t publish it, is it science? That’s the question at the heart of an ongoing debate on X between entrepreneur Elon Musk and pioneering computer scientist Yann LeCun. Over the past few days, the conversation sprawled into a brawl about the definition of science, attracting thousands of commentators including researchers of all stripes.

The discussion started on 27 May, after Musk posted on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter): “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” (Musk founded the company xAI to build artificial intelligence (AI) capable of enhanced reasoning. Its first product is a generative-AI chatbot called Grok.)

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty

LeCun, chief AI scientist at tech giant Meta, is known for his foundational work in deep learning and neural networks. He called out the post, saying that Musk “claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform”. It escalated quickly , with Musk questioning what science LeCun had done in the past five years. LeCun, who also holds an academic post in AI at New York University in New York City, replied: “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?”

LeCun then posted saying “if you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science”. He argued that research is only ‘science’ when it is collected as a body of knowledge, tested for correctness and reproducibility and then published. “Technological marvels don’t just pop out of the vacuum. They are built on years (sometimes decades) of scientific research,” he said . Without sharing that scientific information, “technological progress would slow to a crawl”.

LeCun’s definition of science sparked a backlash. Some people criticized him for not mentioning that science is not just a collection of facts, but is often considered a systematic method . Another tech entrepreneur — Palmer Luckey, who developed the virtual-reality headset Oculus — condemned the idea that “people who don’t publish their research for peer review will die bitter and forgotten”. Still others argued that scientific experiments done at companies are often kept private; even outside the private sector, 40% of data from academic and government scientists goes unpublished, according to some estimates .

“LeCun still misses the very essence of how science works. Saying ‘science is only science if it is published’ gatekeeps the idea that science is a method of understanding that people can use in their daily lives,” says Peter Coveney, a computer scientist at University College London.

The importance of feedback

LeCun later clarified his definition, posting: “science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”

He also hinted in his posts that there is need for more openness in AI research, in particular the source code underlying neural networks. Coveney and philosopher of science Janet Stemwedel at San José State University in California agree with LeCun on this point, especially amid criticisms that AI algorithms — such as those underlying the chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-video tool Sora, made by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, and AlphaFold3 , the protein-structure-prediction tool created by Google DeepMind in London — are being developed and launched without the publication of their code.

“The big issue is that you need to expose your knowledge claims to rigorous examination, and you need to be responsive to the feedback that emerges from that,” says Stemwedel. She added that philosophers of science now see responsiveness to feedback as a cornerstone of modern definitions of science, alongside principles such as the utility of science for making predictions and providing explanations.

Coveney pointed to the development of generalist AI tools, which aim to interpret data and produce advanced reasoning abilities without being specifically trained for individual tasks. “At the heart of it is a large language model like ChatGPT, but they implement what’s called foundation models to solve problems.” He says that it’s questionable how scientific their methods are, even when their processes can be scrutinized by scientists.

Twitter changed science — what happens now it’s in turmoil?

xAI, for instance, is making the AI tools that it develops open source. “Musk argues that we can provide scientific explanations by using explainable AI like xAI, thereby replacing conventional ways of doing science,” says Coveney. “The problem is that a machine ingesting scientific literature and then creating statistical inferences does not confer understanding to the machine. It’s not an objective and rational way of creating scientific theories.”

Debated definition

The definition of science will always be contentious, says Stemwedel, who has studied how scientists use Twitter and X. Before Musk took over, Twitter had a beneficial role in overall discussions about science, and people showed that science could be responsive to feedback. “Early discussions showed objectivity is not a property of individual scientists, but rather of the collective efforts of a knowledge-building community. In the Musk era , I’m afraid things have gotten less responsive to reason.”

Amid the debate, Coveney says that it’s crucial to maintain the fundamental ideas of science that stem from the Enlightenment.

“The central element is, if you can’t have an objective discussion, then you’re not doing science, because you’re just articulating your opinions,” he says. The irony, adds Coveney, is that this is exactly what was happening during the debate on X.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01626-z

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Ten with MIT connections win 2024 Hertz Foundation Fellowships

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The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation  announced that it has awarded fellowships to 10 PhD students with ties to MIT. The prestigious award provides each recipient with five years of doctoral-level research funding (up to a total of $250,000), which allows them the flexibility and autonomy to pursue their own innovative ideas.

Fellows also receive lifelong access to Hertz Foundation programs, such as events, mentoring, and networking. They join the ranks of over 1,300 former Hertz Fellows who are leaders and scholars in a range of fields in science, engineering, and technology. Connections among fellows over the years have sparked collaborations in startups, research, and technology commercialization.

The 10 MIT recipients are among a total of 18 Hertz Foundation Fellows scholars selected this year from across the country. Five of them received their undergraduate degrees at the Institute and will pursue their PhDs at other schools. Two are current MIT graduate students, and four will begin their studies here in the fall.

“For more than 60 years, Hertz Fellows have led scientific and technical innovation in national security, applied biological sciences, materials research, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and more. Their contributions have been essential in advancing U.S. competitiveness,” says Stephen Fantone, chair of the Hertz Foundation board of directors and founder and president of Optikos Corp. “I’m excited to watch our newest Hertz Fellows as they pursue challenging research and continue the strong tradition of applying their work for the greater good.”

This year’s MIT-affiliated awardees are:

Owen Dugan ’24 graduated from MIT in just two-and-a-half years with a degree in physics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. His research interests lie at the intersection of AI and physics. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in a broad range of areas, including using physics concepts to enhance the speed of large language models and developing machine learning algorithms that automatically discover scientific theories. He was recognized with MIT’s Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award and is a U.S. Presidential Scholar, a Neo Scholar, and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Dugan holds multiple patents, co-developed an app to reduce food waste, and co-founded a startup that builds tools to verify the authenticity of digital images.

Kaylie Hausknecht will begin her physics doctorate at MIT in the fall, having completing her undergraduate degree in physics and astrophysics at Harvard University. While there, her undergraduate research focused on developing new machine learning techniques to solve problems in a range of fields, such as fluid dynamics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics. She received the Hoopes Prize for her senior thesis, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and won two major writing awards. In addition, she completed five NASA internships. As an intern, she helped identify 301 new exoplanets using archival data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Hausknecht served as the co-president of Harvard’s chapter of Science Club for Girls, which works to encourage girls from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue STEM.

Elijah Lew-Smith majored in physics at Brown University and plans to pursue a doctoral degree in physics at MIT. He is a theoretical physicist with broad intellectual interests in effective field theory (EFT), which is the study of systems with many interacting degrees of freedom. EFT reveals how to extract the relevant, long-distance behavior from complicated microscopic rules. In 2023, he received a national award to work on applying EFT systematically to non-equilibrium and active systems such as fluctuating hydrodynamics or flocking birds. In addition, Lew-Smith received a scholarship from the U.S. State Department to live for a year in Dakar, Senegal, and later studied at ’École Polytechnique in Paris, France.

Rupert Li ’24 earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at MIT in mathematics as well as computer science, data science, and economics, with a minor in business analytics.He was named a 2024 Marshall Scholar and will study abroad for a year at Cambridge University before matriculating at Stanford University for a mathematics doctorate. As an undergraduate, Li authored 12 math research articles, primarily in combinatorics, but also including discrete geometry, probability, and harmonic analysis. He was recognized for his work with a Barry Goldwater Scholarship and an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize, one of the highest undergraduate honors in mathematics.

Amani Maina-Kilaas is a first-year doctoral student at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where he studies computational psycholinguistics. In particular, he is interested in using artificial intelligence as a scientific tool to study how the mind works, and using what we know about the mind to develop more cognitively realistic models. Maina-Kilaas earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Harvey Mudd College. There, he conducted research regarding intention perception and theoretical machine learning, earning the Astronaut Scholarship and Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

Zoë Marschner ’23 is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University working on geometry processing, a subfield of computer graphics focused on how to represent and work with geometric data digitally; in her research, she aims to make these representations capable of enabling fundamentally better algorithms for solving geometric problems across science and engineering. As an undergraduate at MIT, she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and math and pursued research in geometry processing, including repairing hexahedral meshes and detecting intersections between high-order surfaces. She also interned at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where she worked on collision detection algorithms for simulation. Marschner is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship and the Goldwater Scholarship.

Zijian (William) Niu will start a doctoral program in computational and systems biology at MIT in the fall. He has a particular interest in developing new methods for imaging proteins and other biomolecules in their native cellular environments and using those data to build computational models for predicting their dynamics and molecular interactions. Niu received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, biophysics, and physics from the University of Pennsylvania. His undergraduate research involved developing novel computational methods for biological image analysis. He was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for creating a deep-learning algorithm for accurately detecting tiny diffraction-limited spots in fluorescence microscopy images that outperformed existing methods in quantifying spatial transcriptomics data.

James Roney received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University in computer science and statistics, respectively. He is currently working as a machine learning research engineer at D.E. Shaw Research. His past research has focused on interpreting the internal workings of AlphaFold and modeling cancer evolution. Roney plans to pursue a PhD in computational biology at MIT, with a specific interest in developing computational models of protein structure, function, and evolution and using those models to engineer novel proteins for applications in biotechnology.

Anna Sappington ’19 is a student in the Harvard University-MIT MD-PhD Program, currently in the first year of her doctoral program at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. She is interested in building methods to predict evolutionary events, especially connections among machine learning, biology, and chemistry to develop reinforcement learning models inspired by evolutionary biology. Sappington graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and molecular biology. As an undergraduate, she was awarded a 2018 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and selected as a Burchard Scholar and an Amgen Scholar. After graduating, she earned a master’s degree in genomic medicine from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, as well as a master’s degree in machine learning from University College London.

Jason Yang ’22  received his bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in computer science from MIT and is currently a doctoral student in genetics at Stanford University. He is interested in understanding the biological processes that underlie human health and disease. At MIT, and subsequently at Massachusetts General Hospital, Yang worked on the mechanisms involved in neurodegeneration in repeat expansion diseases, uncovering a novel molecular consequence of repeat protein aggregation.

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