Success with
Students with high grade point averages often
carry an unhealthy load of stress. How can schools help?
Jerusha Conner, Denise Pope, and Mollie Galloway
The headlines are alarming. Many students who feel the pressure to succeed have been cheating, pulling all nighters to study, becoming
depressed, and seeking relief in drug
use and self-mutilation. Multiple news
reports have directed attention to what
some are calling an epidemic of student
stress in top U.S. schools (see, for
example, Boccella, 2007; Keates, 2007;
McMahon, 2007). These headlines are
not just media hype; empirical data
corroborate the reports.
Our study explored what students
themselves said about the causes of their
school-related stress and then looked at
ways to reduce it. We hoped to find
ways for schools to reverse this trend by
developing healthier school environments that promote student engagement
and well-being.
From 2006 to 2008, we gathered data
from 3,645 students, attending seven
high-performing high schools in the
California Bay Area. These students
appear to be exemplars. The vast
majority ( 85 percent) reported a grade
point average of 3.0 or higher, and most
( 63 percent) reported that they often or
always work hard in school. They value
achievement and care about learning. In
addition, 89 percent participate in an
extracurricular activity after school, and
most aspire to attend a four-year college.
By most indicators, these are the kinds
of students we would like our high
schools to produce.
A different story emerges, however,
from our data. Many students reported
feeling stressed out, overworked, and
sleep deprived. They spoke of the tolls
of stress on their mental and physical
well-being and on their ability to learn
academic material. Ultimately, their
comments raise questions about
whether a student’s grade point average,
frequently used as a marker of student
success, is a good indicator of what
students are actually learning and
accomplishing.
Academic Stress and Its Causes
Science has long recognized that some
level of stress can be adaptive and even
healthy (Seyle, 1956); however, chronic
student stress has been consistently
associated with negative outcomes
(Grant, Compas, Thurn, McMahon, &
Gipson, 2004; Kaplan, Liu, & Kaplan,
2005). For the majority of students in
this study, academic stress is constant.
More than 70 percent of students
reported that they often or always feel
stressed by their schoolwork, and 56
percent reported often or always
worrying about such things as grades,
tests, and college acceptance.
Analyses of students’ responses to the
open-ended question, “Right now in
your life, what causes you the most
stress?” confirm that academics and
schoolwork are major stressors for these
youth. Other high-frequency answers
included the college admissions process,
large projects and assignments, and
standardized tests. Students highlighted
these school-related factors as causing
more stress than other life stressors,
such as social issues or family life.
Answers such as “family pressure,”
“divorce,” and “parent/sibling illness”
did not fall into the top 10 most
frequent answers at any school.
Students’ responses demonstrated
that many feel that schoolwork dominates their day. Certainly, a large share of
their time is spent in school, but the
demands do not let up after the last bell
rings. On average, students in our study
reported spending 3.07 hours on homework each night. This does not include
time spent online on social activities,
such as chatting with friends, or
browsing the Internet. One student
explained:
For some reason all teachers love to
assign huge amounts of homework on the
same nights, which keeps me awake till
all hours trying to find the best possible
answers because there is a lot of pressure
put on us kids to do so well.
