Effects of educational peer support on wellbeing: a review

Abstract

The benefits of peer supported educational strategies have been documented for different academic and psychological variables. Most of the meta-analysis and reviews refer to psychological variables such as anxiety or self-concept. A high number of studies included peer supported interventions which aim strictly at improvements of mental wellbeing, but with no educational training, instruction or sharing of knowledge included. In this research, a review is carried out to gather articles reporting educational peer support experiences and its influence on wellbeing. The main aim of this article is to assess the influence of educational peer support on participants’ wellbeing. A total of 14 studies from years 2007 to 2021 were included in this review belonging to different educational levels from primary to post-university education. The average effect size was Hedge’s g = 1.64 (standard deviation = 1.12). All studies reported positive effect sizes and 85.71% of the studies reported significant improvements for the wellbeing variable. The main conclusion is that peer supported strategies are very beneficial for participants’ wellbeing. It is important to note that the vast majority of studies in the field belonged to higher education or post-university educational contexts. Hence, more research is needed to address the potentialities of peer supported learning strategies on primary and secondary education students’ wellbeing. Another important conclusion is that mixed methods are highly recommended as a small minority of studies in the field include both, quantitative and qualitative analysis.