Mood Monitoring in Schools: A Promising Alternative to Single-Time-Point Screening

School-based mental health screening typically relies on single-time-point assessments, which may lead to inaccuracies in identifying students in need of support. Misclassification as either false positives (students flagged unnecessarily) or false negatives (students needing help but overlooked) can have significant consequences. Mood monitoring, a method that involves repeated assessments over time, may offer a more precise and informative approach to screening. We conducted a mood monitoring study in two schools over seven weeks (United Kingdom, n = 413; Australia, n = 418). Students completed the Brief Emotional Experience Scale (BEES) weekly to assess fluctuations in emotional well-being. At the conclusion of the study, students provided feedback on their experience. While 79% of students maintained consistent moderate to high emotional well-being, 17% fluctuated above and below the threshold for low well-being, and 4% maintained consistently low emotional well-being. This suggests that a single-time-point assessment could misclassify up to one in six students. Additionally, over half of the students reported that mood monitoring helped them better understand their own well-being, and a substantial proportion indicated that it encouraged conversations about mental health with peers, parents, or guardians. By tracking emotional well-being over time, this approach may reduce misclassification errors and enhance students’ emotional awareness and communication about mental health. Future research should focus on optimizing the implementation of mood monitoring in different school contexts and assessing its long-term impact on student well-being.