Anxiety and Its Affect on Academic Achievement
Roger Morales
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Abstract
Anxiety is a common occurrence today especcially among students in a college or university. Even though there has been some studies into anxiety and how it affects a person 's academic achievement there needs to be more done in order to know better the relationship between them. Self questionnaires will be handed out to all participants who agreed to participate and their academic progress will be monitored during the course of the study in order to determine what kind of relationship there is between anxiety and academic achievement.
Anxiety and Its Affect on Academic Achievement
In society today anxiety is a fairly common occurrence. Almost everyone has anxiety in one form or another. For a lot of people anxiety is often viewed as something negative impacting their lives. Anxiety for a lot of people can make an experience a negative one. Anxiety can have negative impacts on a person 's life and that means it can also have a negative effect in the classroom. Anxiety is often part of the learning process. Usually there is not much thought into how social anxiety plays a role in the learning process. Social anxiety can discourage students to engage in and prevent them from learning. What effects anxiety has on academic achievement are not always readily apparent but they can have a negative influence on academic performance. It is important to know the
Anxiety is defined as the body’s natural response to danger, an automatic alarm that goes off when you feel threatened, under pressure, or are facing a stressful situation. A little bit of anxiety can actually help a person stay attentive and on track. If we did not feel a certain level of pressure at a job or school, then perhaps we wouldn’t care about it as much. We might slack or leave a few loose ends that may cause us to fall behind. A little bit is actually beneficial, but unfortunately there are people who have to deal with anxiety as part of a mental illness or disorder. There are different types of anxiety which include: general anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and social phobia.
“Don’t let fear stop you from achieving what you want,” says the President and founder at Metaphrasis Language & Cultural Solutions LLC, Elizabeth Colon. This advice has been given to me multiple times as I wrestled with mental health. Anxiety in our youth is becoming a more common thing to see in America however knowing how to cope with anxiety is not often taught but has to be figured out.
To address this phenomenon, researchers have proposed different theories of test anxiety to account for the effects of test anxiety on the deficits of academic performance. According to scholars such as Schmidt and Riniolo (1999), the cognitive aspects of test anxiety - worry and task-relevant thinking - are also present in social anxiety. Therefore, students who experience test anxiety may also suffer from other types of psychological and cognitive problems such as self-esteem, cognitive development, social skills and memory. Essentially, the students who suffer from test anxiety are individuals who are unable to cope with any types of stress. Considering the stressful nature of
Anxiety has both mental and physical effects, it is our internal alarm system to put our mind on a physical alert and prepares for us a "fight or flight response". This alarm can go away when we know that everything is okay and there is no danger nearby or nothing is going to happen but sometimes our alarm will not shut off and then an anxiety problem persists. There are different types of anxiety disorders and I will discuss generalized anxiety disorder
stress and to relieve anxiety varies from one person to another” (p. 1). The author
Anxiety is a very common disorder when it comes to students in school. There are various types of anxiety, one common example is test taking anxiety. Test taking anxiety is a nervous feeling that students have while taking a test, and sometimes before or after taking the exam. This makes it impossible for students to do their best and to show their knowledge. When students are under stress it causes them to have physical symptoms, such as sweating or rapid breathing. Students who aren't prepared for tests, but care about doing well are also likely to have test anxiety before taking any type of test. Supporters argue standardized tests effectively measure student achievement, and opponents argue that tests are good for measuring students’ performances.
Anxiety can be a very serious (disease/disorder) it is simply defined as an abnormal fear or tension which can occur without any obvious trigger or session; a recurrence, unwelcome and intrusive thought. Anxiety can also be defined as a subjective state of fear or tension. There are two types of anxiety, anxiety can provide signals that alert the body to trigger it to improve mental and physical performance
Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. It helps some one deal with a tense situation in the office, study harder for an exam, keep focused on an important speech. In general, it helps some one cope. But when anxiety becomes an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations, it has become a disabling disorder.
What is Anxiety? As defined by Understanding Psychology by Glencoe, Anxiety is a general state of dread or uneasiness that a person feels in response to a real or imagined danger. Anxiety affects 19 million Americans annually and anxiety disorder happens to be the most common mental illness in America. There are many different types of anxiety disorder such as: Panic Disorder, Obsessive – Compulsion Disorder, Phobias, and a few more. Although there is no cure for anxiety disorders, there are treatments to reduce symptoms.
Generalized anxiety is a problem that the United States faces nationwide. As we grow older and move into educational settings that are more taxing, anxiety becomes more prevalent. Today, college students are facing more stress than ever before. They are constantly pushed to be the best they can be, to be in the most extracurricular activities they can be in, and to attend the best schools possible. All of these goals and high expectations lead students to be harder on themselves, which makes other aspects of their life fall by the wayside, leading to high levels of stress and pressure.
Students with higher social anxiety described having adjustment issues in academic, social, personal/emotional, and institutional by the end of their first semester than students with lower social anxiety. These results supported their hypothesis. New students that arrived with social anxiety struggled with depression, anxiety, and maintaining good grades, these symptoms present themselves throughout their first year of college. Contrary to predictions student’s high social anxiety improved the social self-esteem as the 1st semester went on. The results also showed that academic self-esteem mediated the relationship between social anxiety and academic adjustment. Low self-esteem and high social anxiety played a great role in the decrease in GPA in the first semester and retention one year later. These results fully supported their third and fourth hypothesis stating global, academic, and social self-esteem at Time 1 would mediate the relationship between social anxiety and social, academic, personal/emotional, and institutional college adjustment and that low self-esteem and high social anxiety would contribute greatly to low GPA and overall
An individual that has strives to live with anxiety or an anxiety disorder faces many struggles daily because of the feelings the conditions stimulate. There are an infinite amount of symptoms, causes, and consequences, but an equal amount of treatment options and ways to handle anxiety. Anxiety disorders can be viewed as general or extremely specific, but all in all each one affects the life of a person living with one or knowing someone who struggles with it. In regards to teenagers specifically, between three and five percent children and adolescents in the United States have some sort of anxiety disorder (Foa and Andrews 2). With the many challenges teenagers already face because of pressure based on school, athletics, social
Tet anxiety is a very common thing among American students, especially for those whore are in higher education. This type of anxiety causes psychological tension that students experience before taking test. In the moment of test anxiety students have a strong feelings of failure that is followed by panic and stress pressure. Apparently many studies have showed that test anxiety often causes students to perform worse on the exam. "Test anxiety: Why it is increasing and 3 ways to curb it" by Valerie Strauss and " Anxiety, Self-Efficacy, and College Exam Grades" by Jennifer Barrows, Samantha Dunn, Carrie A. Lloyd are popular and scholarly articles that discuss test anxiety in US higher education and how it disadvantages students.
INTRODUCTION: Even though stress negatively affects physical and mental abilities. Stress is the cause of tensions, overwork and increasing demands. Generally, the Anxiety is a part of our life. We live with it, manage it, or more all stress over it. Our lifestyle, the region in which we live, the economy, and our occupations can result in a lot of anxiety. Not everybody manages the same level of anxiety and there are a few elements that can affect our lives and reason us to have higher or lower anxiety levels. (Feldman, 2009)
Social Anxiety causes poor academic performance and high levels of academic anxiety can negatively affect working memory (Owens, Stevenson, Hadwin, & Norgate, 2012). This disables the student to pay attention to the lesson properly. Students with this disorder have weaker student teacher relationship, and therefore can cause conflicts, and less of a desire for a teacher to help that student. (Volbrechet 2010).