Small Group Instruction Can Improve Adolescent Mental Health and Peer Relations: Findings From A Technology-Assisted...

Internalizing symptoms in adolescents (e.g., anxiety, loneliness, depression) increased following the COVID-19 pandemic, and can have detrimental impacts on engagement, learning, and overall school success. Cooperative Learning (CL), a small-group instructional approach that creates intergroup collaboration among students, has an extensive track record of improving peer relations and school belonging, which may reduce social stress and protect against internalizing symptoms. However, adhering to the key design principles that make CL successful can be difficult for teachers to do in their everyday practice, underscoring the need for technology-assisted CL. This study evaluated the first-year outcomes of a universal, technology-assisted CL intervention (i.e., PeerLearning.net) on peer relations and, in turn, internalizing symptoms. We also examined whether intervention effects varied by students' baseline symptom levels, sex, and race. Participants were 9th-grade students (N = 691; 55% female; 45% non-White) from 13 high schools in Oregon and Arizona, and student surveys were administered in the fall (pre-test) and spring (post-test). Multilevel models were used to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention at the posttest, accounting for school-level clustering and contextual school characteristics. We found that students in intervention schools showed significantly more positive peer relations and reduced stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness as compared to control schools. Moderation analyses indicated that students with higher initial peer stress, victimization and loneliness benefited the most, showing greater reductions in symptoms. These findings support universal, scalable, and integrated approaches to youth mental health in the post-COVID era.