COMPOSTELA NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

Poblacion, Compostela, Compostela Valley

Lapu-Lapu St. Poblacion Compostela, Compostela Valley
SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL DEPARTMENT

STRESS IN A PANDEMIC: VIRUS EFFECT ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN GAS

5 WISDOM

In Partial Fullfillment of the Requirements in

Practical Research ll of GAS 5 WISDOM

Submitted by:
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INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Stress, as how American Psychological Association define it, is a normal reaction to

everyday pressures, but can become unhealthy when it upsets your day-to-day functioning. In
the event of pandemic where daily routines are broken and new normal arises, various effects
can be seen in terms of students handle the new methods of attaining education.

In a study by Ye, Et. Al. In 2019 (Effect of the novel coronavirus pneumonia
pandemic on medical student psychological stress and its influencing factors). The risk of
psychological stress had risen higher with the event of covid-19 pandemic breaking out.
Students are seen to suffer from more stress and more as the pandemic progresses due to
factors such as economic, financial and socio emotional that had been seen affect the student
daily life. This stress had led to lesser enthusiasm to do school work and professional work in
the future. This outbreak brought additional stress on students specially who were already
under pressure. This has resulted in increased mental and psychological issues in students.

Among this number are over 28 million Filipino learners across academic levels who have to
stay at home and comply with the Philippine government’s quarantine measures (UNESCO,
2020). To respond to the needs of learners, especially of the 3.5 million tertiary-level students
enrolled in approximately 2,400 HEIs, certain HEIs in the country have implemented
proactive policies for the continuance of education despite the closure. These policies include
modified forms of online learning that aim to facilitate student learning activities. Online
learning might be in terms of synchronous, real-time lectures and time-based outcomes
assessments, or asynchronous, delayed-time activities, like pre-recorded video lectures and
time-independent assessments (Oztok et al., 2013). In addition, the academic demands
required by institution increases every year, resulting in an increased degree of stress.
According to Dy et al. (2015), the top stressors of their students are the academic difficulty of
subject matter, workload due to subjects, time management because of subjects,
responsibilities due to being on one's own, and time management because of both subjects
and organizations. According to most high school students

Stressful activities for students are the exams, term papers, organizational activities,
deadlines, and the like (Agolla & Ongori, 2009), which students in college usually encounter.
Most of the students in the Philippines facing the effect of the Covid-19 virus on their
Academic performance.

Everyone gets stressed. Whether its financial troubles, relationships, health problems, or
work, there is pretty much and endless list of things that can rile you up and leave you feeling
frazzled. For some people, though, the consequences of stress can show up more outwardly
than it does in others. The sum of physical, emotional and mental strains or tensions of a
persons is what stress means. Stress can result from a reaction to a situation in which a person
feels threatened or pressured or sometimes both. Learning and memory can be affected by
stress. Although an optimal level of stress can enhance ability, too much stress can cause
physical and mental health problems, reduce self-esteem and may affect the academic
performance of the students. Knowing this, researchers have claimed that students do
experience academic stress. Academic stress is a type of stress that the students are facing in
terms of managing their time, limit to extend effort, self-expectation and involvement for the
sake of academic performances, this study aims to know the effects of stress to students
academic performance in Ateneo de Davao Senior High School.

Review Related Literature

This chapter covers the review of related literature related to this study. The researchers now
present some previous researches that had been conducting about the factors that affect
academic performances during their mental health breakdown and how did they manage to
cope up with the struggle they are facing.
Stressor
A stressor is a stimulus that causes stress. A stressor triggers a stress response in the
body, which causes a physiological change. This change causes us to either fight or run
from the source of the stress.
Aysan, Thompson and Hamarat (2001) in their study found that the juniors tend to have
higher reaction to stress compared to the seniors and this is due to their adjustment to
the new university life. Some causes of stress among the students including heavy
workload, un-clear assignments, having difficulty to understand the context, feeling of
in-competence, poor motivation to learn, participation in class presentation, relationship
with family and friends, time pressures, and sleeping habits may affect some students’

mental health.

Students encounter a lot of challenges in their daily life hence the idea of a vibrant
university life is disclosed by these challenges which contribute to stress (Pariat et al.,
2014). Many of them face hardship and difficulties in their studies and working life. For
some university students, stress has become a way of living. Students are often challenged
with many different personal and interpersonal challenges and the disability of these students
to embrace the challenges and demands in university has turned into one of the most
common reasons for students to withdraw from their tertiary education (Gerdes &
Mallinckrodt as cited in Abdullah, Elias, Uli & Mahyuddin, 2010, p. 378).

Stress

Medical Encyclopedia, defined stress is a feeling of emotional or physical tension. It can

come from any event or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous. Stress is
your body reaction to a challenge or demand. On the other hand, in terms of students, stress
according to Youki Terada A majority of these students—68 percent—experienced a drop in
grades in the first semester and reported feeling stressed as a result. In how they handled that
stress, two clear groups emerged. Students who believed that intelligence can be developed—
a growth mindset—were more likely to see setbacks as temporary, and not only had lower
overall cortisol levels but were able to return to lower levels shortly after a setback. Students
who believed that intelligence is fixed, on the other hand, maintained high cortisol level for
longer, said researchers—a stress response that tends to depress problem solving and
intellectual flexibility.

Coping Mechanism
 According to APA Dictionary of Psychology any conscious or nonconscious adjustment or
adaptation that decreases tension and anxiety in a stressful experience or situation. Modifying
maladaptive coping mechanisms is often the focus of psychological interventions.

Journal Adolescent Health state that further results have indicated that coping strategies were
more closely related with psychological adjustment than stressors [6,7]. Overall, by
distinguishing coping styles in more direct coping modes (i.e., problem-focused, primary
control, or approach coping) and more indirect coping efforts (emotion-focused, secondary
control, or avoidance coping); (for review see [8]), problem-focused coping was negatively
associated, but emotion-focused coping positively correlated with internalizing and
externalizing disorders [9]. However, some results suggest that adaptive and maladaptive
coping strategies are confounded in these dichotomized dimensions. Thus, results strongly
indicate that coping should be operationalized by a multidimensional concept (cf. [8,10]).
Similar to Seiffge-Krenke [6] and Connor-Smith and Compas [11], in the present study a
threefactor model of coping was examined to avoid a confounding of adaptive and
maladaptive coping strategies. Thereby, coping styles were differentiated in two adaptive
coping styles (emotion- and problem-focused coping) and one adaptive coping style, which
were represented by nine coping strategies. Emotion-focused coping comprised of
minimization and distraction, problem-focused coping consisted of situation control, positive
self-instructions, and social support; maladaptive coping included passive avoidance,
rumination, resignation, and aggression. In general, previous studies have shown that
adaptive coping strategies were linked with better psychological adjustment, but maladaptive
coping strategies were related to less adjustment.
 Framework of the study

MEDIATING VARIABLE

STRESS

VIRUS ACADEMIC
PERFORMANCE

INDEPENDENT VARIABLE
DEPENDENT VARIABLE

Factors:
Financial
Psychological Issues
Social Emotional

In this conceptual framework, there are assumed mediating variable that are taken into consideration
that somehow can affect the relationship of the independent variable to the dependent variable .
Hence, they would potentially influence the dependent variable.

Statement of the Problem

 Covid-19 stress among students is quite common in the world many of them are not aware
that they are affected by stress. Stress in academic institutions is now a days higher as they
may create negative and positive impact if it is not treated properly, especially in academic
institutions the working and organizational set-up is entirely different when compared with
non-academic institutions were the stress level of the students who are in the GAS are more
likely to be under stress when compared with Junior high students. Most of the students who
enter into the modular learning or online learning have more stress as the entire subjects are
different. Meanwhile, the students who have even scored good marks in their exams or
modules . Till the exams and modules and the concept of module makes them more stressful
when they fail to by hurt the subjects in Senior High. Likewise there are lots of pressure for
the present generation especially to learn more and more than the past generations for their
better future. Many academic institutions in the form of maintaining discipline they make
students stressful on not allowing the students to mingle with peer groups, heavy and
challenging workload.
Stress reduces students work rate, reduces ability to learn in class, and causes lack of
concentration in class. This in turn leads to producing poor quality work and reduces
academic performance. Therefore, academic stress has a negative relationship with students'
performance.

Scope and Delimitation

The focus of this phenomenological study is to provide in information about covid 19
effects on students stress. Specially, this study will be delimited to compostela national high
school campus, grade 12 students who specialized in general academic strand. In this study,
the researcher will conduct an interview to the selected participants who has been qualified to
the following criteria such as ;(1) the students must have enrolled to the institution
(compostela national high school): (2) the students should be a grade 12 student/s of the
institution, who specialized in general academic strand. The participants will be selected
through purposive sampling in which they will be able to give their responses that will help
the researchers in this study. Due to the pandemic that the world has been suffering, the
researcher will conduct a virtual interview with the selected individuals in order to obtain
information. We were not permitted to conduct a face-to-face interview in order to collect
data. To make this study possible, the researcher will contact the selected indiividuals via
various social media sites and conduct the interview via google meet or zoom. However,
depending on the situation, the interview and information collection approach may alter.

Significance of the Study

This study will be undertaken to find out and understand the experience that the students are
undergoing as they are studying in a compromised environment due to pandemic happening
at the moment and if it some way affects the level of stress they feeling because today stress
depression, anxiety have a very huge impact in each individual specially to those students
who cannot handle the situation. The findings of this study will an eye-opener to society and
each individual as to how pandemic affects student performance in academic.

This study contributes to the study by giving a better understanding on the struggles of the
students to stress. Through this study, it generates knowledge and it provides useful
information and helps decision making, in it is a tool for building knowledge and facilitating
learning so that it can contribute in each one of us. It influence the students and to know the
importance of their mental health due to academic performances, and so that the teachers will
also give importance to them

Definition of Terms

Phenomenological study- A phenomenological study explores what people experienced and

focuses on their experience of a phenomena. As phenomenology has a strong foundation in
philosophy.

Anxiety - some students experience the feeling of being distressed, fearful, or stressed out as
a result of school pressures is called academic anxiety.

Academic stress - is defined as the body's response to academic related demands that exceed
adaptive capabilities of students. Its is estimated that of 15 % of students experience of
academic stress during covid 19 pandemic .

Feeling frazzled - in a state of extreme physical or nervous fatigue and agitation So

relentlessly and it is like anxiety.

Research Design
The study employed the qualitative method of research, using the phenomenological
approach. In understanding the experience of the students about this experience to cope up
stress, depression, and anxiety, the researchers believe that the most appropriate type of
research that helped as answer the question in our mind is qualitative research.
The researchers used phenomenological because a group of students from Compostela
National High School GAS 5 Wisdom, Grade 12 Students, Personally experiencing
depression, anxiety and coping mechanisms in every academic performance during
pandemic. This qualitative research is intended to dig deeper, and understand a specific
problem on how they manage the struggles they have faces and the effects of it.
The qualitative study involved online survey with the Grade 12 Students of Compostela
National High School focusing on their experiences more specifically on their stress,
depression and anxiety experience as they learning during pandemic.

Research Respondents
The respondents of this research are the students of Compostela National High School, Gas
5 Wisdom by using purposive sampling, the students will be answering the online survey or
the Google Forms. These students have countless experience coping stress, depression and
anxiety. Some of them did really lose their motivations to pursue their academic
performance, self-esteem has been lowered that made them think that they are no more
efficient to perform and do their task on learning. On the other hand, some students made
those as their motivation to strive hard.

Data Collection

During the in-depth online survey with the participants and collecting data, the researchers
will use multilingual.The participants are free to use or answer questions on their own
computer, tablet or smartphone. Before we can conduct a survey to the participants, we make
a mock interview with the call members of our group, so they can assess if the way of
delivering the questions are correct and to assess the participants if they are answering it
directly or not.

Survey will be conducted during vacation time and even on weekends, because not all of the
participants are available and it is hard to reach them one by one. Making sure also that the
survey will be go smoothly according to the time they spend. In the actual survey will let a
record on the papers, and we researchers will write down all the important information.

Statistical Treatment of Data

As soon as the researchers gathered the data, they were compiled, sorted, organized and
tabulated. They were subject to statistical in order to answer the questions proposed in the
study. The statistical tools employed were the percentage.
Percentage is to be used to determined the proportion of each given data by using the formula

%= (F/N) X 100

Where:

%= Percentage

F= No. of respondents

N= total number of cases

There are 21 respondents, percentage of students who suffered academic stress are 15% in
GAS 5 WISDOM