Compassionate Communication Among Peers in an Engineering Course Leads to Increased Social Connectedness, Reduced Perceived Stigma, and Improved Team Collaboration

Students’ academic success and wellbeing are interconnected, yet university courses rarely promote mental health and compassionate practices. To bridge the divide between academic and social-emotional learning, an intervention was designed that required students to engage in compassionate communication with their classmates by posting help-offering messages in Slack. In this mixed methods study, quantitative data were collected from first-year undergraduates (N = 36) in two team-based engineering courses (intervention group n = 24; comparison group n = 12). A pre- and post-intervention survey assessed students’ beliefs and experiences concerning compassion-related variables. The qualitative data collected included students’ Slack posts (n = 43) and individual interviews with participants from the intervention group (n = 6). Pre-post survey changes showed no significant differences in the comparison group, while significant pre-post changes were found in the intervention group (p < .05). Students reported an increase in social connectedness, a greater valuing of compassionate interactions amidst academic work, and a dramatic reduction in perceived stigma. Students also shared how the intervention strengthened team communication and collaboration during technical decision-making meetings. These findings demonstrate that compassion-based interventions can be embedded within preexisting undergraduate courses, including STEM subjects, to enrich academic learning and wellbeing.