Machine Learning Methods in Student Mental Health Research: An Ethics-Centered Systematic Literature Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study conducts an ethics-centered analysis of the AI/ML models used in Student Mental Health (SMH) research, considering the ethical principles of fairness, privacy, transparency, and interpretability. First, this paper surveys the AI/ML methods used in the extant SMH literature published between 2015 and 2024, as well as the main health outcomes, to inform future work in the SMH field. Then, it leverages advanced topic modeling techniques to depict the prevailing themes in the corpus. Finally, this study proposes novel measurable privacy, transparency (reporting and replicability), interpretability, and fairness metrics scores as a multi-dimensional integrative framework to evaluate the extent of ethics awareness and consideration in AI/ML-enabled SMH research. Findings show that (i) 65% of the surveyed papers disregard the privacy principle; (ii) 59% of the studies use black-box models resulting in low interpretability scores; and (iii) barely 18% of the papers provide demographic information about participants, indicating a limited consideration of the fairness principle. Nonetheless, the transparency principle is implemented at a satisfactory level with mean reporting and replicability scores of 80%. Overall, our results suggest a significant lack of awareness and consideration for the ethical principles of privacy, fairness, and interpretability in AI/ML-enabled SMH research. As AI/ML continues to expand in SMH, incorporating ethical considerations at every stage—from design to dissemination—is essential for producing ethically responsible and reliable research.
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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 | 0.161 | 0.389 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".