How OSU assesses the wellbeing of graduate students at scale

"I've tried to implement surveys many times, and my teams would not trust it. Elation was the first survey that had such a high completion rate, and my team actually trusted it."

Catherine Quatman-Yates

Associate Professor Division of Physical Therapy at Ohio State University

With more than 60 years experience preparing students for successful careers in PT, Ohio State’s doctorate of physical therapy degree program is among the very best in the country. Our well-trained faculty, state-of-the-art healthcare facilities and network of supportive alumni and mentors all add to the value of a degree from this program.

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What were you doing before elation?

“We were just monitoring and looking at our team performance from afar. Nothing structured.”

We did general advising to students and things like that. My research in the space was on thinking at a systems level about how these little things at the individual and maybe even individual patient level build up to system-level outcomes, whether that be the patient outcomes or the state of the workforce, essentially.

My entry into the well-being space just came from seeing this as a major crisis that we needed to work to address.

We got a big grant from the Bureau of Workers Comp to work on healthcare and worker well-being, and we did some deep dives in trying to find some system-level solutions and address some of the concerns that people had around this, including providing mindfulness.

We were working on solutions about how to help make it so that healthcare workers could do better.

After finding Elation

"For me, it felt like a great way to take the temperature of the group and then know that we have to do a lot more work behind the scenes to help our team."

When I saw the potential, and what I really liked about Elation that I hadn't seen in some other tools that we've tried, was that we could run our own survey.

The reality is we've done this enough times, and we have implemented with enough groups who don't often trust it.

So a third party tool like Elation that is private and confidential can be actually something that creates a little psychological safety.

The strategic coaching to the group and then showing what actions you can take after doing it, was maybe one of the best outcomes.

We even had a national-level survey that was actually personally developed by people at Ohio State, but it's really been focused on the individual level, and it doesn't necessarily give feedback about how a program or a defined unit could use that as a way to take the temperature of how the group, the collective, how the team is actually doing.

Key takeaways using Elation:

• Helped to properly assess graduate student cohorts performance and well being

• Accurately visualize influencers affecting students at a team level, not at an individual level

• Provide clear individual action items to improve individual performance

• Created shared awareness between students and faculty