Encouraging Self-Compassion

Carolyn McEwen teaches in the School of Kinesiology,  in the areas of statistics, research methods, and sport and exercise psychology. Statistics anxiety has been identified as a key challenge for students in undergraduate statistics courses (Tishkovskaya & Lancaster, 2012). In response to this phenomenon, she introduced a self-compassion program into a large introductory undergraduate statistics course. Students participated in six five-to-ten minute self-reflection activities at key points in the term. These activities were shared alongside tutorial content using Mentimeter and small group discussion. These activities were designed based on the literature on self-compassion interventions (Mosewich et al., 2013; Desmond, 2017). They provided students with the opportunity to reflect on their beliefs about learning, build self-compassion, and connect with each other.

The impact of the embedded self-compassion activities was assessed with a key question in mind:  Does an embedded self-compassion program in an introductory statistics course relate to students’ changes in emotion regulation, sense of belonging, mental well-being, academic buoyancy, academic performance, and statistics anxiety?

Key findings include:

• A negative association between subscales of statistics anxiety and final grade
• Self-compassion may have a buffering effect on increasing catastrophizing and decreasing sense of belonging at UBC and in KIN throughout the term.

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