Vol. 11, Special Issue 4 (2022)

Author(s):
Mukta G Sthavarmath and Manjula Patil

Abstract:
Stress and anxiety are common psychological problems which were adversely affecting the high school students academic performance and socio-emotional behavior. A study was made on influence of stress and anxiety on scholastic performance and socio-emotional behavior of urban and rural high school students to study the stress and anxiety among urban and rural high school students and to examine the influence of stress and anxiety on scholastic performance and socio-emotional behavior of urban and rural high school students. The population for the study comprised of Kannada medium government and private aided high school students, where 240 students from each urban and rural areas were drawn from Dharwad taluk of Karnataka. For the present study, the permission was sought from Block Education Officer and the Heads of the schools were contacted and permission was taken for conducting the study. From each class, 20 students were taken for the study randomly. Structured questionnaire on stressors (Targar 2009) ^[22], Study anxiety questionnaire (Vitasari et al. 2010) ^[23] and academic anxiety questionnaire (Andreson 2007) were used to know the stress, study anxiety and academic anxiety of students. Scholastic performance of the children-Rutter proforma-A (1967) ^[18] and child behavior checklist-teacher report form (Achenbach, 2001) ^[2] were used to know the scholastic performance and socio-emotional behavior of students. Result revealed that, higher the level of stress and anxiety lower the scholastic performance of high school students and majority of students with high level of stress and anxiety were in clinical range of behavior problems and low level of stress and anxiety among students were in normal behavior. This indicates the immediate need for counseling programmes for high school students to reduce the stress and anxiety during study period as well as during exams and to increase the scholastic performance and to reduce behavior problems of students.