2

In this report I wanted to investigate something which I have personally experienced, something that really stood out to me was the anxiety I have felt over the past year and a half as a result of studying my Alevels. I believed that I would find unmanageable goals to be the most significant cause of anxiety for Alevel students, also that the effect of this anxiety will be to decrease overall performance.

4
The was the initial title I planned to use was The impact of education on stress, however this was changed to my current title because of advise given to me by my supervisor. The change was recommended because the working title is very vague not revealing very much about the project, also if the title is a question it will aid it in being more focused. This is why my final title is What effect does anxiety have on performance at Alevels and why?

5
The first thing I did to start making this report was to look at research that has already been done by other people, the majority of this research has been done by universities. However not all of it was, an example of this is an article I used from the popular newspaper The Guardian, this article looked at how the number of A-level students getting help for stress related problems has increased over the past year, the number calling the Young minds hotline, a mental health charity for young people, has increased nearly 10% since 2010. They blame this increase on the pressure that is currently placed on A-level students for university places because of the changes in government legislation.

5
The White Rose Research is research which has been formed by three different universities as a joint project, these universities are Leeds, Sheffield and York and their research looked at how personality differences affect the degree to which anxiety affects nursing students in Malaysia. They found that more conscientious students suffer less negative effects as a result of anxiety than others. The university of Malaysia found that low-achieving students experience greater levels of anxiety than high achieving ones.

5
The university of Southampton has provided me with a considerable amount of different research, the majority of which has been completed by the doctoral students studying there. The other source I used was a book called Stress and Health by a psychologist called Bouteyre, this showed that 41% of students who had just started University were suffering from depression.

6
To gather my primary research I used a questionnaire with 30 participants who are all currently aged between 17 and 19, nearly half of them were female and nearly half male. All of the participants were sampled depending on who was available in the area I was performing the research, this means it is an opportunity sample.

7
As you can see from this graph males believe their main cause of anxiety is related to exams whereas with females it is failure to achieve goals, the least cause of anxiety is relationships for both male and females. This is closely followed by workload for females, workload as a cause of anxiety for females is considerably less than it is for males showing that females may feel they are better able to cope with workload and can manage workload better.

8
This shows that of the 77% of the participants who had already completed their AS qualifications the majority of them did not feel satisfied with the grade they achieved. This provides more evidence for the fact that failure to achieve goals is a significant part of studying A-levels because if these students felt they had achieved their goals they would be satisfied with the grade they got.

9
This graph clearly shows that Female students actually feel more pressure around exams than males, even though when asked what they thought the greatest cause of anxiety is male students said that they believed it to be exams. This may mean that although males believe exams are their greatest source of anxiety it is not the pressure surrounding the exams that causes the anxiety. As with the females who say they feel the most pressure around exams but it is not their main source of anxiety but instead failure to achieve goals. This could mean that the pressure females feel around exams is caused by the fear of not achieving their goal grade in the exam and not the exam itself.

10