Student Success Megastudy: Mindfulness Intervention

Last registered on September 19, 2025
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Student Success Megastudy: Mindfulness Intervention
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0016796
Initial registration date
September 16, 2025

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
September 19, 2025, 10:03 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Heather Royer
Affiliation
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Lester Lusher
PI Affiliation
University of Pittsburgh
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PI Name
Chad Stecher
PI Affiliation
Arizona State University
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Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2025-04-14
End date
2027-05-31
Keywords
Education, Health
Additional Keywords
mindfulness
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
OSF Good, Behavior C. f. 2025. “Student Success Megastudy Pre-registration.” OSF. April 11. osf.io/wdhp3.
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
US college students frequently experience anxiety, stress, and feelings of isolation, with over 40 percent
showing at least one symptom of depression. These mental health struggles can significantly impact
students’ well-being and academic performance. The stakes are high—one in four full-time students
leaves college without earning a degree, and nearly 20 percent cite mental health challenges as a key
reason for dropping out. We aim to tackle this issue via a randomized controlled trial intervention
encouraging first-year college students to develop and maintain a mindfulness meditation practice
through the use of an app, called Healthy Minds. Our intervention will be a part of a megastudy
launched by Behavioral Change for Good Initiative (BCFG) in 2025 that will simultaneously test eight
innovative interventions designed to boost college student success and retention across 21 large public
universities, engaging nearly 200,000 student participants. The whole trial has been previously registered on OSF. Our intervention encourages meditation app usage through monetary incentives for downloading the app and maintaining app engagement
during the 2025 Fall term. We conducted a similar pilot study among UC Santa Barbara students in
the 2024 Fall term to help us refine the intervention design, and we hypothesize that our intervention
will improve academic performance (GPA) and college retention.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Lusher, Lester, Heather Royer and Chad Stecher. 2025. "Student Success Megastudy: Mindfulness Intervention." AEA RCT Registry. September 19. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.16796-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Our intervention is one of eight interventions aimed at students and designed to improve college student success on underrepresented minority (URM) students and non-URM students. Our intervention involves encouraging students to download a mindfulness app and use it. Our intervention will be compared to the outcomes of the other interventions and to that of a control group.
Intervention Start Date
2025-08-01
Intervention End Date
2026-05-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
The two key dependent variables are (1) student GPA during the semester of our intervention (fall 2025) and (2) whether the student is enrolled in school in the semester following our intervention (beginning in winter 2026).
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The megastudy will recruit first-year college students across several college campuses through the United States. Upon recruitment into the study, individuals will be randomized into one of nine conditions, one of which is a control condition. The intervention we have contributed relates to mindfulness. Students randomized to our condition will be asked to download a mindfulness app and will earn lottery tickets for engagement with app weekly.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization will be done by a random number generator.
Randomization Unit
The randomization will be at the individual level by school.
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
33 Schools
Sample size: planned number of observations
94,000
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
10444 in the mindfulness intervention and 10444 in control
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
University of Pennsylvania
IRB Approval Date
2025-04-11
IRB Approval Number
857020
Analysis Plan