Mood Monitoring in Schools: A Promising Alternative to Single-Time-Point Screening.

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Public Health

Background:

• School-based mental health screening often uses single assessments, assuming stable emotional well-being.
• This approach may misclassify students whose well-being fluctuates over time.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the stability of emotional well-being classifications using repeated mood monitoring in secondary school students.
• To assess the impact of assessment timing and aggregation methods on classification outcomes.
• To explore student perceptions of repeated mental health monitoring.

Main Methods:

• Weekly administration of the Brief Emotional Experience Scale to 767 secondary students across the UK and Australia over 6-7 weeks.
• Analysis of emotional well-being classifications relative to a low well-being threshold.
• Comparison of classification stability across different time points and aggregation methods.
• Post-monitoring survey on student experiences and perceptions.

Main Results:

• 78% of students maintained consistent above-threshold well-being classifications; 5% were consistently below.
• 17% of students fluctuated above and below the threshold, indicating sensitivity to assessment timing.
• The proportion of students identified as low well-being varied from 5% (stability-based) to 12% (averaged scores).
• Repeated monitoring provided temporal context, identifying a different subset of students compared to single-time-point assessments.

Conclusions:

• Single-time-point mental health screening may be insufficient for accurately classifying all students' emotional well-being.
• Repeated mood monitoring offers a more comprehensive understanding of student well-being, aiding interpretation of screening decisions.
• Student feedback suggests repeated monitoring can enhance emotional understanding and encourage communication about well-being.