Understanding student pressures within our AHS community
CONNEXT Staff
Guest Writers
CONNEXT is an outside-of-school club whose primary vision is to secure a sense of unity within the AHS community. Since last summer, this group has made big plans to see that its goal is reached. As a team, the members have worked earnestly, setting aside precious time in their busy high school lives. Recently, they concluded CONNEXT’s latest activity, Project “You R Not Alone.” Set up as an online survey directed to all AHS students, this project aims to help students realize that they are not isolated in their academic and personal struggles. The survey has yielded outstanding results, with over 680 participants from all grades.
Project “You R Not Alone” compiled information from the AHS student population, asking for their grade, descriptions of their extracurricular participation, their stress levels and sources, and their favored styles of learning and teaching. The questions were presented using an array of multiple choice, ranking, and free response formats to ensure that there was room for individual expression amid the gathering of statistical data.
The results were very telling. Based on the statistics from the ranking of schoolwork stress, many students believed the most compelling stressor was maintaining grades. Over 300 students, had similar views on grade pressure. The second highest was tests, followed by workload, group projects, and learning pace. Surprisingly, students blame themselves the most. The hierarchy of personal stressors start off with the individual, then parents, teachers, peers, and society. Further dissecting the data, each grade ranked themselves on two aspects — the amount of stress they felt and how well they thought they were doing in school. The juniors seemed to have the largest contrast, with highest stress levels and the lowest confidence. Sophomores came second highest. Freshmen on average believed they had a balance between their stress and reward. When comparing anxiety caused by personal sources versus school work, over 75% believed that school work was more stressful.
As a club, CONNEXT is proud to have had so many eager partakers in the survey. The results have shown that while all students may face unique (often obscured) problems, these are difficulties that do not have to be shouldered alone. Additionally, CONNEXT believes that its project can provide important feedback for fellow peers and teachers on the foundation of student education. Following this project, the club hopes to find potential solutions which will not only improve the educational environment but also build stronger communication between students, parents, and teachers.
| Top 3: Preferred Methods of Learning | Top 3: Preferred Methods of Being Taught |
| Group study with people you are familiar with (70.2%)Self-Study (62%)Partner Pairs (36.9%) | Visually (hand gestures, posters, diagrams, etc. [66.5%])Physically (hands-on projects [56.8%])Verbally (40.2%) |
Eagle Era 