Theme Sheet 3: Pressure on Students in Class That Creates a Sense of Stress

Some of the pressures students experience in learning situations and teaching in general have been drawn from various evaluations:

Motivation and lack of time to mentally connect the dots between submissions, exercise classes, lectures, and possibly lab exercises.

• It is important to build reflection time into the teaching process to scaffold the development of deep understanding.
• Studies show that about one month into the semester, students experience a dip in motivation and self-efficacy, which must be addressed to achieve mastery and success.

Pace – students point out:

• Lack of “thinking breaks”, both in lectures, in exercise classes, and in the overall study flow.
• Work overload. Difficulty keeping up with all course activities, forcing students to prioritise – for example, staying home to work on reports and assignments instead of attending exercise classes.
• Multiple assignments across courses often overlap in timing.

Difficulty identifying what is important.

• In the learning process, it is hard to distinguish core content from “nice-to-know” material.

Lack of understanding of content structure – and absence of overview

• Direction is important! Where are we heading with what we are learning today?
• Structure is important! How does this fit into the knowledge we already have?

Lack of presence and mutual understanding between students and teacher

• It can make a big difference for students to feel that the teacher tries to get to know them—even in large classes. Remember examples or questions contributed by students and refer back to them later; ask about students’ motivation as well as their content and academic interests and see if you can actively use this in your teaching. Learn (a few) names if possible.

Corrective feedback instead of explanatory feedback

• It is stressful to only be told something is “not good enough” instead of receiving guidance on how to improve and take the next steps in learning. Consider changing some classes into group- og individual feedback sessions.

The student feels alone with doubts and questions and is not integrated into the learning community or comfortable with peers

• Students report in several of our evaluations, that due to a lack of psychological safety in the classroom, they do not participate actively or ask questions. This appears to correlate with a lack of perceived mastery which is a crucial outcome of insecurity in the class setting and may result in dropout.
• New studies show that students do not sit at the back of the classroom to avoid being questioned by the teacher. Rather, they do so because it feels unsafe when their peers are looking over their shoulders.