The transition from high school to college is an arduous process; students are torn from the structured environment of high school and flung into the chaos of college life where one is expected to be fully independent. It is no wonder, then, that some students crumple beneath the heavy weight of change and succumb to stress. First defined as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change” in 1936 by Hans Selye, stress was considered to be synonymous with distress. (The American Institute of Stress, n.d.) This association has caused stress to be generalised as a negative emotion, ignoring the positive effects stress can generate. Anxiety and stress goes hand in hand; while anxiety can be caused by environmental and medical factors, it is most commonly triggered by stress. Considered a general term for several disorders that can cause nervousness, apprehension and fear – anxiety can be further subcategorised into anxieties which are linked to academia (Crosta, 2013). This essay will touch upon library anxiety, a few of these anxieties would be library anxiety, writing anxiety, math anxiety and test anxiety.
Library anxiety was first discovered by Mellon (1986) in a qualitative study of college students’ feelings about using the library. College requires research to be performed in order to complete a project or paper, and students who are fresh out of high school are often out of their depth as they have never been to a college library. It was found that such students describe their initial reaction to library research in terms of fear, and it presented itself in three ways – students believed their research skills to be inadequate when compared to other students, perceived their feelings of inadequacy to be embar...
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Mathematics education has undergone many changes over the last several years. Some of these changes include the key concepts all students must master and how they are taught. According to Jacob Vigdor, the concerns about students’ math achievements have always been apparent. A few reasons that are negatively impacting the productivity of students’ math achievements are historical events that influenced mathematics, how math is being taught, and differentiation of curriculum.
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The pressures of students today is a main reason to the increase of anxiety in young adults. In one article Jessica Minahan (2012) argues that “Anxiety impacts a student 's working memory, making it difficult to learn and retain information. The anxious student works and thinks less efficiently, which significantly affects the student 's learning capability.” (Minahan, 2012) Students who deal with anxiety tend to have a harder time in school compared to other fellow classmates. With the level of pressure there is for teenagers to be good students this affects their level of anxiety which makes learning harder for them. Students with higher level of stress tend to feel more anxious than other do to the pressures of being a student. Professor Eysenck argues (2009) “This shows that it is important that teachers focus not only on whether a student’s academic performance seems to be OK but also on how much effort the student had to put in to achieve that level. Anxious students may be trying desperately hard just to keep up and this could be at great psychological cost,” (Eysenck, 2009) Anxiety has more of an effect on how much effort it takes to perform one task than on how
A number of scales have been created examining mathematics anxiety of pre-service teachers (Bekdemir, 2010; Gresham, 2007). However, there is little available research examining test anxiety among this population. Test anxiety can have detrimental side effects o...
Math in general makes people feel anxious or nervous. Chapter two: overcoming math anxiety touches on several important points; the definition of math anxiety, the explanation of rational emotive theory (RET), some of the most common irrational beliefs, types of self-talk and tips to reduce or deal with math anxiety.
Most students experience some degree of test anxiety. Test anxiety refers to a combination of physiological, emotional, and psychological components that are caused by the stress of taking exams. This may interfere with one's ability to think, reason, and plan. For some students, test anxiety is an unpleasant experience but doesn't necessarily interfere with exam performance. For other students, however, test anxiety is not only an unpleasant experience but also seriously interferes with exam performance.
...occupying their minds with irrelevant things that do not pertain to the task at hand (Vassilaki, 2006). Thus, their energy is wasted when it could be used for task elaboration or to help improve their overall academic performance. Students with academic anxiety are self engrossed and lead to their own academic demise. Test anxiety does not only affect a students performance on a test, but Huberty (2009) asserts that test anxiety overtime tends to contribute to more common underachievement. He describes the consequences of constant test anxiety including lowered self-esteem, reduced effort, and loss of desire to complete school tasks. Students who have academic anxiety also have a higher risk of developing depression, and often feel deprived of confidence (Cunningham, 2008). Thus, academic anxiety can become extreme, and have negative effects of students’ well being.
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There can be symptoms of test anxiety. These are some of the symptoms of test anxiety.
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Some children find that mathematics is too abstract and does not connect to their daily life. They may find mathematics boring and irrelevant. Children who are forced to learn mathematics through rote memorization might find that they do not understand mathematical concepts and are unable to solve problems at a higher level as their foundation and grasp of basic math concepts are weak. Children who are forced to sit still and learn math by doing many worksheets may develop math anxiety and an aversion to numbers.