Students go through various learning barriers in their learning process. One of these is the fear of academic failure, primarily associated with the psychological aspect of the students. It can differ from student to student. For some, it is not being the best student as always, whereas for others, it is the fear of a decrease in their rank, being unable to complete the project, or not getting an A. The psychological barrier’s impact can affect the students’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Therefore, as a result, we must look for ways to remove these mental barriers to learning.
How Fear Builds Psychological Barriers to Learning
The learning barriers harm the student’s outcome. It’s important to understand the role of feat in building obstacles to learning that appear in various forms!
1. Motivational Barriers
Students tend to lose their motivation. Students can feel that the lesson they are learning is irrelevant to their lives or not something they find interesting. This affects their learning journey problems. When students lose motivation to learn anything new, it affects their learning.
2. Emotional Barriers
The feeling of not being enough influences the enthusiasm students show in the classroom, the amount of knowledge they can take, and the effort they put into their work. Some emotions can be productive, while others often suppress learning. The fear of failure can lead to anxiety and build low self-esteem among the students. The fear of change can make students resistant to trying new methods.
How to Overcome Fear of Academic Failure?
Parents and teachers must also support overcoming the fear of academic failure among the students. It’s important to understand that failures and setbacks are opportunities for students to grow.
1. Build a Growth Mindset
The process of failing and winning comes along in the learning process. Students need to understand that they’re only competing with themselves. They should strive to do better than what they are doing and look to the positive sides of healthy competition.
Rather than building a fear of academic failure, they should take it as an opportunity to outgrow themselves and familiarize themselves with various learning concepts and topics.
Teachers and parents have a role to play in helping students build a growth mindset. Instead of asking them to perform better and comparing themselves with each other, they should strive to help each of the individuals perform better than they are doing.
Comparison and criticism can affect the growth mindset and build fear among students. So, providing students with a growth mindset is important by making the learning process a healthy competition.
2. Set Realistic Goals
Learning comes with various challenges, and students are likely to set a goal for themselves and try to achieve it. When these goals set by the students are unrealistic and affect their learning process, it’s no longer a realistic goal. For example, if the student gets the 15th rank in the class, their next goal should be in the top 10 instead of 1st. Setting goals for the first positions can affect their learning process and create pressure on their learning. With realistic goals, they can achieve every goal individually and tend to be happy about their achievement.
Teachers and parents have an essential role to play here as well. They should encourage students to perform better with realistic goals that motivate them instead of unrealistic goals that affect them. For students feeling overwhelmed by academic pressures, seeking tools and resources like study guides or even opting to buy a research paper online can help alleviate stress and support their learning journey.
3. Provide Constructive Feedback
Feedback from teachers and parents is most important. Young students might not be well informed about handling the stress, anxiety, and pressure of academic learning. Parents must be involved in their children’s learning behaviour and struggles and help them as much as possible. For example, parents can offer psychological support to their children who might be stressed, and the fear of academic failure might affect their mental, physical, and academic health.Â
4. Normalize Failure as Part of Learning
Winning and losing is the nature of learning. You can’t always emerge as the winner when participating in the competition. There are days when you win and days when you lose. Similarly, when it comes to academic performance, there are times when you might be doing very well, and there can be days of failure. Still, all of these are the learning process.
Failure doesn’t mean you’re a loser; it means you’re still trying. Teachers can establish a supportive classroom by allowing open discussion for students and teaching them the value and essence of learning and not being too indulged with the ranks and position, but instead learning to enjoy the process, concepts, ideas, and terminologies.
Conclusion
The fear of academic failure is a response to the situation students assume is dangerous or threatening. Various reasons, such as experiences, beliefs, and expectations, lead to these fears. However, overcoming this fear and confidently pursuing academic goals is possible with the correct approach and strategies. Students need to remember that failure is a part of the learning process and that it’s essential to focus on the process rather than the outcomes. Â
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