Mental health promotion in schools by strengthening self‐efficacy

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to review two school intervention projects aiming to promote students' self‐efficacy in Germany. Self‐efficacy, defined as people's “beliefs in their capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments”, is a core prevention criterion of mental health. It is positively connected to important facets of personality (e.g. motivational orientation, social competencies) as well as to health‐related situation‐specific behaviour (e.g. coping with stress, conflict solving).

Design/methodology/approach

Two intervention projects, “Self‐efficacious Schools – SESC” and “Fostering Self‐efficacy and Self‐Determination in class – FOSS”, made teachers familiar with the concept of self‐efficacy to enable them to develop and adapt intra‐curricular promotion measures of students' school self‐efficacy and social self‐efficacy.

Findings

Individualisation of task demands and performance feedback as well as a high transparency of teachers' demands and evaluation criteria are beneficial for students' school self‐efficacy. Social self‐efficacy is enhanced by establishing a positive class climate, where students support each other and teachers are sensitive to the individual needs of their students.

Research limitations/implications

Both FOSS and SESC are multi‐component non‐randomised controlled studies. Thus, future research is needed focusing on the different measures separately using RCT‐designs.

Practical implications

The actual implementation of promoting strategies into school lessons is the decisive step of strengthening students' mental health at school. As a consequence, promotion measures have to be embedded into organizational structures which can motivate teachers to learn and implement innovation even under unfavourable conditions.

Originality/value

In contrast to extracurricular activities, there has been limited research on the implementation and evaluation of prevention activities continuously integrated into the mainstream school curriculum and normal lessons.

Citation

Jerusalem, M. and Klein Hessling, J. (2009), "Mental health promotion in schools by strengthening self‐efficacy", Health Education, Vol. 109 No. 4, pp. 329-341. https://doi.org/10.1108/09654280910970901