The Factors Affecting to Academic Stress of Ordinary Level Students in Sri Lanka: Referring to Kandy District

Abstract

Stress has been currently recognized as one of the serious health problems that spread around the world among all people despite territorial boundaries, occupation and even age. American Psychological Association has emphasized thoroughly to concern the stress of teens between 9th and 12th grades and glimpse along-term ramifications of the problem if the government would not address it seriously today. Sri Lanka is consisting of a textbook oriented education system and students have to face the examination by memorizing all the subject contents they have learnt and that would be terrible stress making circumstances for the students. Stress is multidisciplinary by nature and is visible in every aspect of life, and education too might influence stress in different forms. Resulting, academic stress is being currently investigated and being a popular topic in the context of stress. It has become a crucial problem among school-going students, hence the study aimed to explore the factors that influence the level of stress among school- going children who sit for the Ordinary Level examination that a competitive entrance examination for Advanced Level studies in Sri Lanka. Accordingly, examination activities, excessive workload, parental pressure, peer pressure and time management influence the stress is measured. The study limited to the Kandy Municipal area and 160 students, who studied were selected for the study randomly and they were reached through a self-developed questionnaire. The SPSS software has been used as a tool to analyze the collected data. Study findings indicated that all considered variables significantly correlated with the students’ stress level. However, only examination activities, peer pressure and time management significantly determine students’ stress level. Hence, more concern is required on exam activities in which structure of papers, time allocation, sample answers, evaluation procedure, on the other hand, parents should not pressure students unnecessarily on higher results even though parents could not obtain in their exams. Further, student level of stress could be minimized by educating them to manage works well with other external demands on them. Keywords: Academic stress, academic