Are academic lectures alone sufficient to help students cope with stress, anxiety, and life challenges? Can the integration of personal coaching into an academic framework improve not only achievement but also mental well-being? And can online coaching deliver through Zoom create meaningful change across an academic semester?
Research Purpose
The purpose of this study was to examine whether integrating evidence-based personal coaching into an academic course could improve students’ mental well-being and their ability to attain personal goals. The researchers sought to compare traditional lecture-based education with traditional education supplemented by online personal coaching and to examine the effects of the intervention on goal attainment, resilience, self-insight, solution-focused thinking, and symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression.
Methodology
This study was a randomized controlled trial using a pre-post design with two groups. The study included 178 Israeli undergraduate students enrolled in a compulsory health promotion course. Following the initial assessment, participants were randomly assigned either to a traditional lecture-only group or to a lecture-plus-coaching group. All participants attended 13 weekly lectures.
Participants in the coaching group additionally received 12 individual 40-minute coaching sessions delivered through Zoom. At the beginning of the semester, each participant defined a personal health-related goal, such as improving physical activity, sleep, or nutrition. Measures included goal attainment, solution-focused thinking, self-insight, resilience, and psychological distress.
The coaching sessions were delivered by 37 MBA students who had received training in Coaching Psychology through five dedicated training workshops and who participated in weekly group supervision throughout the study period.
Key Findings
The findings showed that participants in the coaching group improved significantly on all measured outcomes, whereas participants in the lecture-only group showed no significant changes.
The strongest effect was found for goal attainment. Participants in the coaching group demonstrated a very large improvement in attaining their personal goals, with an effect size of d=1.97, which is considered exceptionally large in psychological research. Additional improvements were found in solution-focused thinking (d=0.65), self-insight (d=0.43), resilience (d=0.37), and reductions in psychological distress, including stress, anxiety, and depression (d=0.33). No significant improvements were found on any of these measures in the lecture-only group.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The researchers conclude that evidence-based personal coaching can serve as a valuable addition to higher education. While lectures provide theoretical knowledge, coaching helps students translate knowledge into action, set goals, build action plans, overcome obstacles, and strengthen self-regulation skills. In addition, the study demonstrated that an effective coaching process can be delivered through an online Zoom format. The researchers suggest viewing coaching as a complement to existing student support services rather than as a substitute for clinical mental health treatment.
Importance for Coaches
This study is particularly important for the coaching profession because it demonstrates, through a randomized controlled trial, the added value of a structured coaching process. The findings show that coaching not only improved goal attainment but also strengthened resilience, self-insight, and solution-focused thinking. In addition, the study provides empirical support for the effectiveness of remote coaching delivered through digital platforms, an issue that has become increasingly important in recent years
Atad, Ofer I., and Anthony M. Grant. 2021. “Evidence-Based Coaching as a Supplement to Traditional Lectures: Impact on Undergraduates’ Goal Attainment and Measures of Mental Well-Being.” International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education 10(3): 249–266.