Changes in university students' mental health following a six-week physical activity intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise in mental health concerns among university students has led to an increased demand for counseling services across post-secondary institutions. Consequently, additional resources are needed to improve the mental health of university students. The purpose of the present study was to test the effects of a six-week physical activity (PA) intervention on university students' mental health. Participants included 49 (32 female, 16 male, 1 gender-variant, Mage= 23.08, SD= 4.96) low-risk sedentary students enrolled at a Canadian university. Participants varied in year of study (first year to graduate studies) and educational program (e.g., Engineering, Law, Science). The intervention comprised two personal training sessions (45 minutes each), including cardiovascular and resistance exercises, and one individual PA counseling session (30 minutes) per week. A pretest-posttest design was implemented wherein the following mental health outcomes were measured: a) psychological distress, b) psychological well-being, and c) quality of life. Paired samples t-test revealed a significant decrease in psychological distress from pre (M= 77.31, SD= 17.03) to post (M= 67.22, SD= 17.97) intervention (p= .000). There was also a significant increase in psychological well-being from pre (M= 45.84, SD= 10.87) to post (M= 50.53, SD= 13.56) intervention (p= .009). Similar results were found for quality of life from pre (M= 29.61, SD= 7.17) to post (M= 36.18, SD= 7.17) intervention (p= .000). The results highlight PA as an effective method to improve university students' mental health, which may reduce their need for counseling services. Recommendations for future development of PA interventions with this sample will be provided.Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the University of Windsor Student Experience for funding this project.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".