Managing Stress Key to Student Success

What do you know about anxiety related to testing and assessment? Did you experience anxiety when you were in college? Did you find a way to overcome it and succeed? Have you thought to share that with your students? The faculty who teach our College Success Skills course (CSSK 1023) include material about test taking and how to deal with anxiety and other issues that may arise when a student feels stress. Of course we cannot go through our lives without experiencing stress but learning how to manage it allows us to be successful. One of the ways you can help your students to be fully prepared for assessment is to have them think about the process itself. What is being assessed and why? Have them think about the types of test questions you are likely to use. Have them actually come up with questions that they think might be on the test. In this way, they can be more productive when it comes to preparing for assessments. Another method you might want to introduce is using music to set a calm and distraction free environment in your classroom. Using music can help students to focus on the task at hand and block out whatever else is going on in their lives at least for the hour or more that they are testing. I suggest using music like Japanese ambient selections. You can use songs like Still Space by Satoshi Ashikawa or Glass Chattering by Yoshio Ojima. Playing this for 3-5 minutes as your student enter the class on the day of testing will help them to be more mindful of what they have learned and allow them to share this with you. Let me know if you try it or if you have other suggestions of music that will help students perform their best.

I Want to Finish But I Have To Work

Well if I didn't have to work to pay for my college, it might be a lot easier to finish. You have probably heard one of your students make this or a similar statement as you talked with them about their poor performance in your class. We as academics often use this anecdotal information when we are discussing how to help students improve their completion rate. Now there is some verified research that may help all of us as we continue to look for solutions. Researchers at North Carolina State University released the results of a survey they produced using the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges instrument. In a news story by Inside Higher Ed, the data show "that working and paying for expenses were the top two challenges community college students said impeded their academic success. The researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 two-year college students from 10 community colleges in California, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming in fall 2017 and 2018." It is too bad that students from Louisiana were not polled but the students that did participate opened a window into the many impediments community college students face. You can read the entire article here.