Causas del estrés académico en estudiantes universitarios

Resumo

University students have to cope certain academic situations that represent a difficult challenge to overcome. Sometimes, students perceive that demands required from these situations exceed their resources, becoming academic stress generators. The aim of this research is to analyze which are the main and more often perceived situations generating academic stress in university students and to determine whether these stressful situations are perceived as often by students from different grades. For this, the sample consisted of students from the University of León, 438 women and 94 men, studying Infant Education (48.5%), Social Education (25.4%) and Labor Relations and Human Resources (26.1%). These stress generating situations were measured with Academic Stress Questionnaire, which forms part of the Academic Stress Questionnaire, and that assesses nine factors: teacher methodological shortcomings, student overload, public participation, negative social climate, lack of control about own academic achievement, lack of value from the contents, low academic self-esteem, exams and lack of participation about own academic work. Overall, the results show that the situations related to exams caused academic stress more often. In addition, the relevance of some situations that cause stress is significantly different in the different grades. Specifically, the situations referred to teacher methodological shortcomings, exams and a lack of value from the contents are perceived as stressful with different frequencies in each grade. Finally, possible actions trying to reduce academic stress in college students are proposed.