How Stress Affect Students' Motivation & Performance?
Stress & Motivation in Education
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Stress has become such an ingrained part of our vocabulary and daily existence that it is difficult to believe that our current use of the term originated only a little more than 50 years ago, when it was essentially “coined” by Hans Selye. Selye, who died in 1982, observed as a medical student that patients suffering from different diseases often exhibited identical signs and symptoms. They just “looked sick”. This observation may have been the first step in his recognition of “stress”. Selye’s definition of stress was “the non-specific response of the body to any demand.” We now know much more about how the brain deals with stress and its effects on our bodies and our immune systems.
Today the word stress is ubiquitous in our everyday conversations. We often hear people say, “I am so stressed out I can hardly think” or “what a stressful day I had.”
Addressing stress in today’s society, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the U.S. under President Obama, said “Stress is an epidemic in our country, and sometimes people turn to unhealthy methods of dealing with it, whether it’s unhealthy foods, or drugs, or violence.”
What is stress? Scientists can’t agree on a single definition of stress, but there is no doubt about what happens inside your body when the body’s “fight-or-flight” response kicks into high gear. Signals from the brain (beginning in the amygdala - the “fire alarm” of the nervous system) release a flood of stress hormones, triggering a variety of biological changes, such as revving up your heart rate and causing the liver to dump glucose into the bloodstream, giving you the energy and strength to flee or swing your fists when danger looms.
One of the organs that the brain signals are the adrenal glands, two small glands that sit on top of the kidneys, that release into the bloodstream the so-called stress hormones - adrenaline and cortisol. It is this action that triggers the fight or flight response.
Unfortunately, humans are hard-wired to flick on the fight or flight response when we face upsetting or mildly annoying circumstances that don’t require us to move. As a result, arguing with our spouse, getting hit with a huge car-repair bill or even watching the nightly news can leave you feeling under threat.
Your body doesn’t recognize the difference between one kind of stress and another. Whether it’s physical stress at the sight of a mountain lion or mental stress caused by your catty co-workers, your body reacts the same way: it pumps out loads of the stress chemicals.
When running from the lion, you put the chemicals to use and get them out of your system—no problem. But when you’re stressed over how your co-worker looked at you, all you can do is go back to your office and stew, leaving a dangerous cocktail of chemicals surging through your body until they are finally metabolized. Many people are faced with the latter type—intense mental stress—on a daily basis, and eventually it leads to adrenal exhaustion, especially when combined with excess caffeine and sugar intake, along with a sedentary lifestyle.
Stress Effects on Three Vital Regions of the Brain: The Prefrontal Cortex, the Amygdala, and the Hippocampus
Neural networks, which collect information from the environment, converge in the Prefrontal cortex (PFC), explains Judy Willis, an expert on the neuroscience of learning. The PFC regulates cognitive and executive functions, such as judgment, organization, prioritization, risk assessment, critical analysis, concept development, and creative problem solving. For learning to occur, the information must enter and then be processed by the PFC.
The amygdala is the fire alarm of the brain, the reputed emotional process center which is essential for memory retention. All information enters the amygdala before it arrives in the PFC. In other words, the amygdala controls what information the PFC receives and then acts on. Under stress, the amygdala hinders learning by limiting the flow of information to the PFC.
Willis, who has written 9 books and more than 200 articles about applying neuroscience research to classroom teaching strategies, submits that the amygdala blocks entry to the PFC in response to negative emotions, fear, stress from frustration and boredom. Conversely, the amygdala opens pathways to the PFC in response to activation of prior knowledge, prediction, curiosity, positive mood induction, achievement, and personal relevance.
Observe the images below showing how the amygdala under stressful conditions restricts the flow of information into the PFC. The top picture is the amygdala and the hippocampus in a normal state while the picture below are these brain regions under stress.
The hippocampus, the memory forming region of the brain, is loaded with cortisol receptors which makes it very responsive to stress signals writes John Medina, the author of the best-selling book Brain Rules 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Medina theorizes that if the stress is not too severe, the brain performs better, but if the stress is too severe or too prolonged, stress will harm learning.
Happy or Stressed Faces
Researchers conducted an experiment on participants while in an fMRI scanner who saw a series of 10 faces that were either stressed or happy. They then were asked to memorize 10 words. Immediately afterwards, they were shown a list of 50 words, and asked if they recognized any of the words from the original list. The stressed impaired participants (those who viewed the stress faces) recognized 27% less words. This research is eye opening due to its simplicity, since looking for a few seconds at ten stressed or happy faces hindered mental recall by nearly one third.
The disruption of the learning process is specifically caused by cortisol which can damage the brain’s white matter pathways, making it harder for areas to communicate with one another as we have all experienced to some degree when we try to think under stress.
Medina adds that an increased cortisol level in the bloodstream is directly related to a negative learning environment which rises the learner’s anxiety level, shuts down processing of what is perceived to be low-priority information (the lesson content), and focuses the brain on what it perceives to be high-priority information (the situation causing the stress), so that the stressful situation is remembered rather than the lesson content. In addition, long-term stress can cause people to gain weight, increase the risk of heart disease and other ailments and may even shrink the brain.
“If mild stress become chronic, the unrelenting cascade of cortisol triggers genetic actions that begin to sever synaptic connections and cause dendrites to atrophy and cells to die; eventually, the hippocampus can end up shriveled, like a raisin,” writes John Ratey in his outstanding book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.
The Stress Response Curve
To better understand how stress affects performance, it is helpful to explore an online article by Sarah Mae Sincero. The article explains The Stress Response Curve created by Nixon (1979) that explains how stress affects performance in graphical terms.
Figure 1: The Stress Response Curve
(Image from lesstress.net)
The curve shows that stress does have a good effect as it increases to the Comfort Zone. In this zone, stress levels are manageable resulting in good performance levels.
However, Sincero notes that “as stress begins to be perceived as overwhelming or excessive, the person reaches a fatigue point wherein the performance levels starts to decline. The ultimate end of overwhelming stress, called burnout, can be exhaustion, ill-health or breakdown.”
Sincero also presents the “Inverted-U” graph created by Robert Yerkes and John Dodson (1908). The graph looks at pressure vs. performance over time, noting that pressure is a “significant life stressor.”
The Inverted-U Model or the Yerkes-Dodson Law
(Image from mindtools.com)
Looking at the left side of the graph, you will notice that low pressure or low levels of stress results in boredom. Even if the task is of great importance, in the absence of an appropriate level of pressure, attention and concentration to perform the task are significantly low.
On the other hand, extreme levels of pressure as indicated on the right side do not mean high performance levels; rather, it’s the same as the result from low pressure – low performance levels due to anxiety or unhappiness.
However, there’s a region called the “area of best performance”. In this region, moderate pressure resulting from optimum stress or stress that is totally manageable leads to the highest level of performance.”
Stress in the Classroom Equals Unwanted Behaviors
For educators, the fMRI study and Sincero’s article have major implications related to classroom instruction.
Numerous studies have shown that the number one reason for students dropping out is boredom, with the top two comments being “the material wasn’t interesting” and “the material wasn’t relevant.”
Judy Willis reminds us that a student’s stress mind reacts in one of three ways: fight (disruptive behaviors), flight (student withdrawal), or freeze (student zoned out). Additional causes of boredom are lack of connections to goals and material that was already mastered.
Therein lies the problem for educators since bored students create novelty for themselves often resulting in discipline problems.
Motivation: Past success = Future success
Motivation results from a reason or reasons that one has for acting or behaving in a particular manner or the general desire or willingness of someone to do something as per the dictionary definition of motivation.
According to Judy Willis, “motivation comes from the probability of success and humans gravitate towards experiences they feel successful at. Naturally, students must believe that their efforts will result in successful learning. Subconsciously, students will ask themselves if their effort leads to something that is successful.”
Whereas successful learners already believe that their efforts will result in improvement and learning. For children who are experience failure, many times the issue is not lack of effort but in believing that their efforts will lead to positive results.
Avoidance Motivation
In his book The Handbook of Approach and Avoidance Motivation, Andrew Elliot defines avoidance motivation as “the energization of behavior by, or the direction of behavior away from, negative stimuli (objects, events, possibilities).”
One of our greatest motivations is avoidance motivation
One of the tenets of avoidance motivation is that humans will go to great lengths to avoid a sense of failure or humiliation, which students use all the time in class, posits Judy Willis. She continues to expound that when students feel that things in the classroom will lead to failure, they naturally will use avoidance motivation to protect themselves from situations that will lead to disappointment and frustration.
Adults also use avoidance motivation. Have you ever looked at your phone’s caller ID and decided not to answer the call? How about walking down a hallway and going into a bathroom to avoid someone? Have you procrastinated recently?
Students tend to shut down when they feel things will lead to failure. One way to deal with stress is to put your head down and the whole world will go away or just fall asleep. Their motivation improves when one’s success builds upon prior success, Willis points out.
Robert Brooks, a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, maintains that no one is not motivated. If you are not motivated, it means you’re dead! He theorizes that all actions are a result of motivation. What we are really saying when we say that students are unmotivated (not motivated) is they are not doing what we would like them to do.
A better way is to ask what is the person avoiding, Brooks proposes. An educator might ask “why does this person have a need to avoid? What are the roots of why students avoid/flee from situations they perceive will lead to failure or humiliation?”
Brooks believes that too many things we do in schools are prescriptions for student failure and is convinced that schools should ask the question of how do I lessen student avoidance motivation instead of how do I punish it.
A recent example was an article describing a middle school principal cutting a student’s hair after discovering the reason the student would not take off his hat (a school policy violation) was because he was ashamed of his recent haircut. The principal correctly observed that "all behavior is communication and when a student is struggling, we need to ask ourselves what happened to this child instead of what's wrong with the child."
Middle School Principal Cuts Student’s Hair
The question then becomes how we create an environment where children will work with us and not against us, Brooks advances. If the teaching strategies you are using with angry and/or resistant students is ineffective, then you must ask yourself what you can do differently to help the situation rather than waiting for the student to change. Don’t be concerned with what they are doing, be concerned with what you are going to provide, he concludes. The web page "Creating a Stress-Free Learning Environment" addresses this issue.