Letters: Academic stress negatively affects wellbeing, academic achievement and motivation.
The stressors can be of variable origins — personal, educational, health or environmental. As academicians, we may not be able to address all kinds of stressors.
However, our responsibility is to handle academic hurdles and rectify issues related to our ego, unawareness, inefficiencies and negligence.
Hence, a healthy and systematised environment is essential to support students' wellbeing and learning trajectory.
In academia, curriculum plays a central role. A poorly developed curriculum can increase students' stress because they find it challenging to cope with mismanaged curricular activities.
The most critical areas of a curriculum are course topics and objectives, instructional methods and delivery, and assessment. A study in 2018, found that 38.5 per cent of students felt stressed because of misunderstanding during class.
In another study (from the Southeast Asian context), researchers detected several sources of stress, some of which could be related (directly or indirectly) to academic or curriculum issues.
Among them were lack of sleep, having two exams in a day, the stressful final week of a semester, talking in front of a class, feeling overwhelmed and attending a class that one dislikes.
Many problems or stressors can be lessened by planning, handling of curriculum and improving teaching-learning quality.
For example, who will feel maximum stress before the exam? It may happen among rote learners who cram a whole semester into a single day of revision before the exam. Rote learners are the product of our curriculum failure.
Again, class time sleepiness could be intrapersonal, but we cannot blame students alone when the incidence is unusually high.
This emphasises two issues: we can consider curriculum revision and delivery to reduce students' academic stress.
First is "student's voice". Curriculum is developed by educationists by considering the why, how and what of a course's outcome.
Experts know what should be taught and why. But, how the "what" will be served to students must be strategised carefully, respecting students' opinions on how they want to experience teaching effectively without compromising quality.
Today's students need more time to gain more skills, so, we must avoid wasting time by maximising teaching effectiveness.
In this process, students can be adjunct curriculum makers, and teachers and students can co-construct knowledge on mutual understanding. Any overnight change in curriculum, unilaterally, can destroy this mutual co-existence and thereby increasing stress.
The second issue is "curriculum alignment" which is crucial for teaching quality. We need to ensure constructive coherence among the main elements of the curriculum (a triadic alignment among objectives, teaching-learning, and assessment) at the course and programme levels.
Programme-level alignment seems more difficult. In another study, researchers at Utrecht University observed that because of a lack of communication among academics, students failed to develop their research knowledge satisfactorily even though this common topic was taught in multiple courses.
This failure was undoubtedly a stressful experience for diligent students.
Finally, to address student academic stress, engage them in curricular processes to increase efficiency, acceptability, transparency, and visibility. Enforcing effective staff-to-staff and staff-to-student-to-alumni communication can be invaluable.
Let's keep in mind that traditional, didactic and authoritative behaviour is no longer consistent with evolving educational theories nor does it fit in with modern practices.
DR KALLYAN K. DEBNATH
Centre of Excellence for Learning & Teaching, AIMST University
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times