The Relationship Between Stress, Anxiety, and Forms of Content Learning

June C. TaylorTHE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRESS, ANXIETY, AND FORMS OF CONTENT LEARNING Mary Grimes, Ph.D., and Paul Eggen, Ph.D., Advisors July, 1979: University of North Florida The prevalence of stress and anxiety in today's world, including ourschools, is apparent. There are two types of anxiety: state anxiety(A-State) and trait anxiety (A-Trait). State anxiety is a transitory emotional state which varies in intensity and over time and leads to ten-sion, apprehension, and activation of the autonomic nervous system.Trait anxiety is the relatively stable tendency or disposition to perceivethreat and respond with A-State reactions. Stress is the external stim-ulus which may provoke anxiety.~fuile education has many purposes, the primary focus is on academic achievement. This is most often determined by the performance on a writtentest covering some particular content. One way to view content is by form;content may be separated into facts, concepts, and generalizations.The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship betweenstress, anxiety, and the ability of ninth grade students to process infor-mation found in differing content forms. Specifically, it was attempted to induce two differing anxiety levels with two randomly assigned groupsof ninth grade students through external stress stimuli presented by theresearcher. One group was placed in a high stress situation; the secondgroup in a low stress situation. Academic achievement was measured by 1student performance on a written test designed to measure ability to acquire facts, concepts, and generalizations after reading a passage of material of general interest.Data were analyzed using a t test in order to attempt to reject the follOwing null hypotheses:1. There is no significant differencebetween the performance on a test of facts ofninth grade students under high stress and ninth grade students under low stress.2. There is no significant differencebetween the performance on a test of conceptsof ninth grade students under high stress andninth grade students under low stress.3. There is no significant difference between the performance on a test of general-izations of ninth grade students under high stress and ninth grade students under lowstress.In order to determine whether there was a relationship between level ofstress and level of anxiety, the following null hypothesis was also considered:4. There is no significant differencebetween the level of state anxiety of ninthgrade students under high stress and ninthgrade students under low stress. Finally, because trait anxiety, as discussed earlier, is the general disposition to perceive threat and respond with increased state anxiety reactions, it was necessary to determine if there was any difference between the tworandomly selected groups in this characteristic: 5. There is no significant differencebetween the level of trait anxiety of ninth grade students under high stress and ninth grade students under low stress. Results from data analysis indicate no significant difference in thescores on the content test in terms of the total test or on any of the specific forms of content questions. There was also no significant difference in A-State level between the high stress group and low stress group. However, results do indicate a significant difference between the twogroups in A-Trait level.Each of these findings is contrary to the expected results of theresearch hypothesis. One possible explanation is that the test was tooeasy; all scores are quite high. Research was conducted in the month ofMay and students may have been "immune" to testing near the end of theschool year. The induced stress levels may not have been strong enoughto affect performance.Students assigned to the low stress group exhibited a significantlyhigher level of A-Trait than did students assigned to the high stressgroup. This finding makes it highly unlikely that the brief experimentalcondition could overcome the basic trait. The fact that there was nodifference in the other measures indicates that the low stress level proba-bly did affect the A-State level and possibly the performance of these students.Future research to examine the relationship between stress, anxiety,and forms of content should be conducted. Subjects might be paired for Iequivalent trait anxiety or a pre-post testing of state and trait anxiety might answer some of the questions raised by this study. As teachers, we need to know the effects of stress and anxiety on student performance \rith different forms of content so that we might modify our teaching methods to suit the needs of our students.