Saturday, October 10, 2009: 5:15 PM
The main objective of this paper is to explore the role of academic skills on first year university students’ anxiety and academic performance. The analysis provides important evidence about the ways that absence of academic skills leads students to anxiety and poor grades.
The data contain information on first year students’ discoveries of academic skills, on theirown anxiety evaluation, and on their exams goals. The data came from a questionnaire designed for this case, and from a semi-structured interview. The sampling frame includes the first year students, from all departments of two Greek universities; the University of Macedonia Economic and Social Sciences (UMES) and the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). A proportionate stratified random sample of 312 students, 166 females and 146 males, was selected. The strata formation was based on university department and gender. The size of the sample represents 10.6% of the first-year student population in these two universities and 5.7% of all first-year students of Economics and Business in Greece. The analysis is based mainly on a recursive structural equation model, which links learning skills, academic writing skills, reading and critical thinking skills, academic speaking kills and notes taking skills with anxiety (which is due to lack of them) and examination marks.
The results show that lack of academic skills, which in Greece are not in a systematic way developed and vary among students, influences negatively and significantly young boys' and girls' peace of mind, that is necessary for better academic performance. Our analysis shows that lack of academic speaking skills is occasionally responsible for severe stress and consequently low academic performance. Young girls seem to be more stressed than boys, when they speak in a lecture room about a topic they have worked on. Lack of reading and critical thinking skills lead students to memorize what they study; this wrong way of learning gives students frequently a severe stress and very poor academic performance.
An important conclusion from our results is that the Greek educational system is in need of radical reform in key skills development similar to those proposed for Great Britain by the Higher Education Quality Council (1995, 1996). Apart from that, there is a need of an Academic Skills Programme, which will be open to every enrolled student at these two Universities. This programme will be set up to enable all students to acquire and thus, enhancing the skills needed to succeed in their studies.
The data contain information on first year students’ discoveries of academic skills, on theirown anxiety evaluation, and on their exams goals. The data came from a questionnaire designed for this case, and from a semi-structured interview. The sampling frame includes the first year students, from all departments of two Greek universities; the University of Macedonia Economic and Social Sciences (UMES) and the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). A proportionate stratified random sample of 312 students, 166 females and 146 males, was selected. The strata formation was based on university department and gender. The size of the sample represents 10.6% of the first-year student population in these two universities and 5.7% of all first-year students of Economics and Business in Greece. The analysis is based mainly on a recursive structural equation model, which links learning skills, academic writing skills, reading and critical thinking skills, academic speaking kills and notes taking skills with anxiety (which is due to lack of them) and examination marks.
The results show that lack of academic skills, which in Greece are not in a systematic way developed and vary among students, influences negatively and significantly young boys' and girls' peace of mind, that is necessary for better academic performance. Our analysis shows that lack of academic speaking skills is occasionally responsible for severe stress and consequently low academic performance. Young girls seem to be more stressed than boys, when they speak in a lecture room about a topic they have worked on. Lack of reading and critical thinking skills lead students to memorize what they study; this wrong way of learning gives students frequently a severe stress and very poor academic performance.
An important conclusion from our results is that the Greek educational system is in need of radical reform in key skills development similar to those proposed for Great Britain by the Higher Education Quality Council (1995, 1996). Apart from that, there is a need of an Academic Skills Programme, which will be open to every enrolled student at these two Universities. This programme will be set up to enable all students to acquire and thus, enhancing the skills needed to succeed in their studies.