1.6 Assignment - Critical Reflection Journal-Blog

Exploring “The Impact of Stress on Academic Performance”

Write a reflective blog post on this week’s readings, Roundtable dialogue, and/or your action research learnings. The blog writing may be your choice, but it must be substantive, including outside scholarly works, etc.

            The further I go along my educational journey, the more I do not know. Technology changes rapidly, and what once was the preferred method of instruction is no longer.  Things like COVID-19 and a worldwide pandemic have transformed the education landscape as we once knew it.  So, as educators, how do we navigate our “why” or “purpose” in a time where the “stresses” of the world we live in are impacting academic performance?

            After restarting my educational journey twelve years ago, I found my passion in working with students to help them succeed and create a learning environment that makes their experience the most effective, efficient, and enriching.  I have concluded that if institutions understand the answers to these three questions, they can reduce their retention issues.  The three questions are: Why they came? Why they stayed? and if they left, why they left?

            These questions are legitimate questions that every institution of higher education faces.  On top of these three questions is the issue of stress and its impact on academic performance. As I move forward in my educational journey, I would like to explore the topic of stress related to academic performance.  One thing I have learned in working with students in various capacities in the last eight years I have worked in higher education as well as in my academic journey is that stress can and likely does play a role in a student’s ability to be successful achieve high academic performance. 

            As I contemplated what topic to explore for the action research portion of this class, an article appeared in my email entitled “The Impact of Stress on Academic Performance.”   With this in mind, I will explore this topic further for the purposes of this project.  Educational institutions, whether P-12 or Higher Education, are in part judged by academic performance.  Considering the newly added stressors of COVID-19 and the worldwide pandemic, schools are faced with even more scrutiny to prove that their efforts in the classroom are producing successful students.  How has and will education systems address the growing issue of stress and combat it to produce successful results?  What role will technology and online education play in tackling the stress problem, or will it add to the stress level of students?  Finally, what are the other indicators of academic performance, and how can we, as educators, effectively address the impact of stress as one of those indicators?