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Conceptual framework of academic stress
Brief introduction of academic stress
Conceptual framework of academic stress
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My pre-calculus teacher walks forward with a large stack of papers and hands me an overturned test - normally a sign of bad results. I flip the packet over and I’m devastated by what I see. On this single math exam, I receive the worst grade I’ve ever had in a class - a 56. At first, I think that everybody failed, and that maybe there’d be a curve. But as my partner receives his test back, I quickly realize I’m wrong. In Debary, Florida, life was easy. Things always just “clicked” for me. My Friday nights were filled with friends and bowling or going to see movies at the local theater. Academics were a breeze too; I was in the Gifted and Talented program and I could get A’s in classes only paying attention half of the time. But here, a 56. In Florida I was a hundred, but in the New Jersey suburbs, the best I can be is a 56. And it feels awful. …show more content…
He turns away snickering. My other classes seemed to follow the same downward trend. They were all intense competitions—ones that I kept losing. To make matters worse, I had no one to turn to. I sat alone at lunch for weeks, shut out by people who had known each other since kindergarten. For the first time, I watched from the outside as everyone else seemed to meet success at every turn. People were nice to me, but not anything real. My own fear and loneliness made it seem like any extension of kindness was fake. A girl named Anna, who I now call a close friend, asked me countless times to eat lunch together, but my own anxieties held me
It has been said that the grass is always greener on the other side. Being excited about the newness and challenges of a new place may not enable it to stay green for a lifetime, but the new place is a great place to spend the next four years. So even though I lived my whole high school life in one city where there were no actual problems, it still was time for me to move where there were new experiences.
On each test instruction booklet handed to the teachers on test day, there is a section including what to do if a student throws up during a test. For this section to be included, it is obvious that testing has caused students in the past to stress themselves out to the point of being sick. Students are spend most of the year preparing to take one or two big tests in the end. The amount of pressure put on students to succeed on these tests is astronomical, making it impossible to focus on the actual goal of assessing their knowledge. A student in Florida spoke to her school board about the absurd expectations from these tests, “Every year I do good in school, but I get low test scores on the FCAP and it feels like a punch in the stomach. This is unfair and I don't want to lose my opportunity to take my advanced classes or get a better education because of this one test.” (Locker) Some students simply do not test well, others try their hardest and still cannot reach the impracticable standards set for them. The individuals who create these test do not understand the pressures of being a student, or the struggle to answer thirty-five questions in a compressed time period. One test cannot accurately measure the intelligence of a
In other words, two teachers may give the same assignment two completely different grades based on their own grading style. This puts an incredible amount of stress on a student because they need to complete assignments that will satisfy their current teacher, whose expectations and grading style could be very similar or very different from the student’s previous teacher. Alfie Kohn believes that the influence grades have on a student’s life doesn’t help this situation, and may even make it worse by providing students with a false sense of security about their knowledge. In her article “From Degrading to De-grading”, she states that scores on tests can be largely based on how the test was written and what skills were tested (Kohn 240). Therefore, it is up to teachers to identify what topics students must master in order to be proficient and score well on standardized tests. But when the class is not structured with a consideration for the material used on such tests, students enter the test blind to the skills that they will be expected to know and use. Anyone can memorize a list of facts off a study guide and score well on a multiple choice test the next day, but skills such as analyzing literature and interpreting a handful of graphs containing data from a scientific experiment are skills that require time and hours of instruction to master.
How does the grading system and learning go together? What makes learning something gradable? How can the grading system determines a child 's knowledge based on a test alone? These questions have popped up in educators ' minds for years. These are the thoughts that motivated people like Liz Mandrell, Jerry Farber and Steven Vogel rectify the grading system in their own views. These authors give valid reasons for understanding why students are affected by the grading system.
Although standardized tests will still be given to students everywhere, the pass fail system must stop. There are alternatives that may be taken to give every student a fair chance while still keeping the effectiveness of the tests. One possibility could be to make the final exam a large part of the student’s grade but not a determinant of whether the student passes or fails. A student who understands and learned the material over the entire semester should not have to repeat a course just because of one bad test result.
In Florida alone, the number of different standardized tests given to students spanning kindergarten through 12th grade has increased to over sixteen. Often students are faced with the harsh realization that not scoring well can mean the difference between a pass and a fail grade. That kind of pressure can lead to a complete shutdown of their learning. Although students are heavily impacted by the pressure and anxiety that accompanies standardized testing, they are not the only ones. Teachers, not unlike students, often have the thought of failing looming over their head....
All of my life I have been a city girl, but I moved to Santa Rosa when I was about 13. Up until I was about 16, I lived there permanently. I used to switch back and forth from parent to parent all of the time. When I first started high school, I went to Piner High and, in my junior year, I went to Montgomery and, from there, to a continuation school. I am currently now back at Piner. I had to basically kick and scream to get back into my regular high school--as you can see there is some drama behind the scene.
My middle school years were incredible. I went to three different schools during my middle school years. I attended McIntyre Middle School, Millbrook Middle School, and Brewbaker Middle School. All three of these schools were amazing and I did great things at each school. I would love to relive my middle school years. I believe middle school could make or break a child. Many children had problems in middle school but me on the other hand went through middle school with a breeze. I never had a problem with any class or subject in middle school. Many of the students adored me at each school I attended. It was never a problem for me to make new friends. If I could go back to middle school I would.
Has your kid or if you are a student, gotten great grades on most test but then just bombed one test? It might not be because they don’t understand it, the student may not know it but they are just not a good test taker, they had a bad day, panicked in the test, the test was not the right level or something happened at home. The New York Times says “It is entirely possible for students to fail tests on such topics and still have, the mathematical abilities or historical knowledge we want.” If the child still has the abilities then why should you take that one test so seriously that their grade goes down? It could have been just because they were nervous at the time. According to education researcher Gregory J. Cizek, anecdotes abound "illustrating how testing... produces gripping anxiety in even the brightest students, and makes young children vomit or cry, or both." This happens so much in Sacramento Bee that teachers are trained to clean vomit off of a test.
I was quietly sitting at the table hoping someone would come up to me and ask me to sit with them, I waited, but no one came up. After a while, I noticed people giving me strange looks, and some people did not even notice me which made me feel uncomfortable. By the strange looks, I felt that people thought that I had no friends, and that I was not social. I wanted lunch to go by quickly, but the time seemed to pass as slow as a snail. Just then, someone whom I have had never met before came up to me.
Imagine answering a couple of questions correctly is crucial to the rest of your life, but you don’t know the right answers. You start to despair because you’re about to bomb this test and flunk out of the class you’re taking. It’s not completely your fault though. Maybe you had a rough couple of days prior to the test, or maybe you did study and you still do not know what to do. You look over and see a beam of light shining down upon your classmates uncovered answer sheet.
A well created test can measure learning and diagnose a student’s weakness (Merrow, 4). In testing, the idea is for the student to get the correct answer on information they know and incorrect answers on the information they do not. However, a testing error may occur. A testing error is when a student gets an answer correct of information they did not actually know or an answer incorrect, they may have actually known (Gellman, 30)The people who create these tests want straightforward measures. However, test designers do not design these tests to measure what a student can do academically (Fusaro, 1). Large testing companies produce tests and sell them all over the country. This causes the test to be not specialized for the school or county and students do not do as well as they could have if the test was specialized (Popham, 4).three possible ways of testing a student’s knowledge exists: multiple choices, answer in essay form, or they are asked to perform a task and then graded on the performance (Merrow, 5). Some tests are designed to assess an individual’s performance, like an
The argument about whether or not standardized testing accurately measures a student's performance continues to be debated. In this paper, I would like to argue that standardized testing does not accurately measure a student's performance. After looking at various opinions of standardized testing, I will consider the subject matter in regards to external factors that can influence a student's thinking process during a standardized test, such as anxiety, stress, and any other problems the student may be encountering. As a Secondary Mathematics Education major, I will have to prepare my future students for standardized testing. Through reviewing both sides of the debate about standardized testing, I can learn how to focus on the objectives of standardized testing in order to apply them to other aspects of academics and real-life situations.
I felt a shock go through my body as I numbed up. “Wh wha what did she want?” My math teacher Mrs. Armstrong was worried about me and the fact that I do all the work in class and homework and when it comes time to take a test I fail. My teacher was willing to let me retake my test.
My birthday was great in the morning but when I got to school somebody said something to me that made me feel down and sad all day I walked slower did not smile as much my friends did not see the difference but somebody who was normally by them self-asked me the most simple question. They asked, “are you okay?” Since then, I have believed that everybody has kindness, even somebody who has been left alone and has nobody to talk to can find