Exam Eustress: Designing Brief Online Interventions for Helping Students Identify Positive Aspects of Stress

Stress reappraisal interventions try to shift students’ negative perceptions towards eustress, stress that can be beneficial, and help them perform better. However, it is less clear how to present them to users as online interventions that are brief, voluntary, and scale well in real-world contexts. We explore the design of online exam eustress interventions by generating six design factors (D1–6) that reinforce a core reappraisal message (D0), and evaluate them through: (i) user interviews (N = 20) revealing six findings (F1–6) on the importance of elaboration, layout, modality, and source of intervention content; (ii) a field experiment (N = 1283) showing a significant positive effect on exam scores (p = 0.003). Subgroup analyses indicate a significant effect for first-year but not for upper-year students, and no detectable gender differences. Our work offers insight into how students interact with online mindset interventions and design considerations for incorporating them into large courses.