Podium Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Are Undergraduates Seeking PERMA In Their College Courses (#48)

Rob Kallmeyer 1
  1. The Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Dallas, TEXAS, United States

The traditional undergraduate education provides students the knowledge and skills to earn a degree toward a career, with a foundation in the Arts and Sciences.  “To get a better job” is a common reason students give for why they attend college (Rampell, 2015).  We know college is considered a career path, but less is known about how students use their college education to achieve other important parts of life.  We know that concepts such as mental health (Auerbach et al., 2016) and meaning in life (Trevisan, 2017) are important to college students; what we don’t know is whether students expect their college courses to help them improve these and other areas of wellbeing.  This study uses the PERMA framework of wellbeing (Seligman, 2011) to answer this question.  This research determines the extent that students want their college courses to help them improve their wellbeing overall and help them improve their experience of each construct in PERMA specifically.