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Abstract: 

Brief behavioral health interventions are believed to distally improve important academic outcomes such as student grades; however, they have not been explicitly supported in the research literature on behavioral health interventions. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a brief form of counseling that has recently been shown to improve students’ grades. Two studies have shown that a single session of MI can improve the math grades of middle school students, and a 2014 study by Terry and colleagues has found that two MI sessions produced significant increases in math, science, and history grades when compared to a single session. The current study is a conceptual replication of the Terry dosage study and examines effect sizes of both one session and two sessions of MI. The study finds that differences between one and two sessions were not statistically or practically significant for individual grades but that the effect size for overall GPA of two sessions of MI was somewhat larger than for one session. This lends further, but tentative, support to the idea that increasing the number of MI sessions could lead to larger effects on grades. These findings are important for building confidence in the ability of brief mental health interventions to improve important academic outcomes.

Keywords: Motivational interviewing, adolescence, behavior and academic outcomes, MI dosage

Affiliations:  1: University of South Carolina; 2: University of South Carolina; 3: Arkansas State University; 4: University of Houston; 5: University of Houston.