Project by: Zoe Karp (10th Grade), Jemma Fox (10th Grade), ()
Project Advisor: Alexis Kahan
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Zoe – Kelly, Jemma – Joy

Recently we’ve been talking a lot about how anxiety affects us in school, and we wanted to explore more about how anxiety affects our school work. We’re conducted a bunch of interviews with a bunch of different students and drew some conclusions from this work.

Questions for Interviews:

Would you say you have anxiety? 

How much homework do you do a night?

What clubs/sports/activities do you participate in?

What’s the main contributor to your anxiety? (family, social, academic etc.)

Is there a type of homework that makes you the most anxious? (essays, math problems, language)

What aspect of school makes you the most anxious? (participating in class, particular subjects, interacting with teachers, getting everything done on time)

Do you feel like you’re prohibited from doing things you’d be doing if you didn’t have homework?

When you get anxious, what do you do to calm yourself down?

Who do you talk to, if anybody, about your anxiety? 

Final Conclusion:

Before conducting our project we came up with a hypothesis about anxiety in our peers and what are some of the large contributors to anxiety in the school. We predicted that many people’s anxiety stemmed from their workload and amount of homework. We also thought that many of our peers were not suited to deal with and handle their anxiety and don’t really know how to deal with it. We mainly based our hypothesis off of how we feel stressed by our workload, I wouldn’t say we are unable to properly handle our anxiety but it is something that many people could understandably have problems dealing with. Based on our hypothesis we began to format an experiment and embarked on our project. 

By sending out a form to the 10th grade, we got a variety of broad responses that definitely helped us prove the statement we began with. It should be said that only 17 of our classmates responded, so it’s a given that the sample size is pretty small, and maybe not reflective of our grade as a whole. We will only be highlighting the questions that help prove our hypothesis, so the following questions and responses aren’t the only ones we got. 

Our first question was “would you say you experience anxiety?” As we thought, 12 said yes, 2 said no, 1 said sometimes and 1 said “I cannot say I have anxiety but I will say that I have been anxious in the past if that helps.” This was pretty much the response we thought we were going to get, having the majority saying that they do experience anxiety. Our next question was asking about the amount of homework people get per night, the average response being 1 hour and 20 minutes to 2 hours. The next question was “What aspect of school makes you the most anxious? The answers ranged from “being in trouble” to “grades” to “getting everything done on time” to specific subjects. As we expected, the answers were mixed, there wasn’t one answer that was the majority meaning people are experiencing anxiety from all aspects of school, and as we learned through a different question, all aspects of their lives. The last two questions, which were “When you get anxious, what do you do to calm yourself down?” and “Who do you talk to, if anybody, about your anxiety?” were the ones that really backed up our hypothesis. For the most part, the responses about calming themselves down were very specific to the person. The responses about talking to people were a lot broader and it seemed like more people didn’t know. 4 people said they didn’t talk to anyone, 2 people said therapists, 2 people didn’t respond and the rest said either friends or family.

In conclusion, our hypothesis was only partly proved right. We were correct in assuming that one of the main causes of anxiety is academic pressure, but wrong in assuming that these students don’t really know how to handle their anxiety. Everyone seemed like they had a very specific way of processing their emotions that they know works, some examples being reading, skincare, listening to music and watching TV. This shows that when people get anxious, they know what works for them and know how to handle it. But, another question seemed to show that some people don’t have someone to talk to about their feelings, which can be extremely valuable when trying to process anxiety. Overall, we have come to believe that much of the anxiety students are having is due to school, and students are more equipped to handle their anxiety than we originally thought.

Zoe’s Reflection:

So far, this project has been a really huge learning experience for me. I knew all of the anxiety I experienced and some of what my close friends did, but I couldn’t have guessed how widespread it is in our grade. Obviously, the questions we asked our peers aren’t able to or attempting to figure out if they have an anxiety disorder, but what we did learn is how people get anxious on a daily basis, and how it has to do with school. We haven’t written our conclusion yet, but it seems like the data we have is backing up the statement we thought about in the beginning, which was the amount of homework directly correlates to the amount of anxiety students have.

Jemma’s Reflection:

This project has been very important to me because as a student who struggles with anxiety it has been really informing to understand that many of my peers are dealing with experiences similar to mine. Whenever I am stressed I can always remember that many of the other students who have the same assignments are also anxious about their work. As of now our hypothesis has proven to be primarily accurate as we predicted that homework and workload are the main sources of students in our grade’s anxiety. I am really happy that we have conducted this project because I think it has just given me a deeper understanding of how other members of our community deal with their anxiety and I think I can learn from that in order to help me in my own experiences.

 

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PROJECT PROPOSAL

Critical thinking, creativity, citizenship and courage are essential LREI learning values. Explain how you’ll draw on at least one of these values to complete your proposed project?

Citizenship is the main LREI learning value that we are drawing on by doing this project. Anxiety is something that many members of our community struggle with and by examining it further and sharing people’s stories we can show people that they aren’t the only ones struggling with it.

What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project? How do you plan to share your learnings with the larger LREI community (e.g., exhibit of work, poster of learnings, performance, etc.)?

We think we’re going to write up the interviews that we’ve had and write a piece about our general conclusions.

Please provide a general outline that indicates your work plan for the trimester? What are some of the key project benchmarks (i.e., goals that will help to ensure that you finish the project)?

Generate questions, conduct interviews, figure out main ideas, write out conclusion.

When do you plan on meeting?
Monday during xblock