Abstract:

Stress is a problem among online graduate learners, resulting in adverse emotional, academic, and health outcomes. Stress is one of the most significant contributors to students' lack of persistence and subsequent failure to complete a graduate program. As performance demands increase at higher academic levels and uncertainty about acceptance and assessment rises, so does the reported stress among students. While interpersonal interventions such as exercise and adequate sleep have been linked to lowering stress in graduate students, little is known about how faculty interactions with students can be targeted at reducing stress in this population.

In second language acquisition classrooms, stress is described within the context of the Affective Filter Hypothesis. The Affective Filter Hypothesis, according to Krashen, refers to emotional factors including anxiety and stress that have been associated with academic success. Krashen posited that for instruction to effectively facilitate the cognitive effort required in language acquisition, stress and anxiety must be mitigated.

Online learning offers opportunities to implement strategies designed to mitigate the stress associated with the high cognitive effort required of graduate learners. Given that the instructor is key to fostering persistence, the faculty member may be uniquely situated to lower stress and offset the affective filter in the online classroom. However, strategies for identifying and reducing stress among graduate online learners have not been explored.

To address this research gap, a multiple case study was conducted to identify strategies that graduate online faculty use to offset the affective filter for students. A secondary purpose of the study was to discover how online faculty identify students experiencing high-stress levels. In this multiple case study, six individual cases were examined. Each case was bounded by a faculty member teaching online doctoral courses, their associated online graduate students, and the online classroom in which they interact. Data were collected through individual interviews with faculty, a written questionnaire completed by students, and artifacts submitted by faculty members exemplifying their strategies for reducing student stress. Analysis of the data resulted in four key themes that will be discussed in this presentation.

These themes are:
(1) Building mutually respectful relationships may lower stress response,
(2) Collaborative effort to support diverse student skill sets and needs,
(3) Importance for Social-Emotional Care for Students and Faculty, and
(4) Need to recognize, acknowledge, and address diverse sources of stress.

Keywords:

Online, graduate, stress, affective filter, faculty.