Abstract:

In higher education, most students are young, which makes them especially vulnerable to present psychosocial disruptions such as stress or anxiety. In the same way, the development of collaborative activities among the students can indeed reduce those levels. That is why the aim of this work is to analyse the effects that the development of learning collaborative projects can have on those levels of anxiety. The collaborative work was implemented for students of the subject Financial Mathematics in the third course of the degree of Management and Business Administration (MBA) and the students of Phytotechnics from the second course of Agri-food and Agro-environmental Engineering (IAA), both of the Miguel Hernández University. The project aimed to analyse the repercussions of Law 3/2020 for the recovery and protection of the Mar Menor and of the agreement that the Segura Hydrographic Confederation has adopted on the declaration of the underground water mass 070.052 Campo de Cartagena in risk of not reaching good quantitative and chemical status. In this project, students had to interact not only with students from the same degree (or same subject) but also with students from another degree (students from the MBA degree with students from IAA degree), and even with professional of the affect sectors (farmers, fisherman’s, etc.). Once the project has finished, and when the confinement was arriving at the end, coinciding with the end of the semester, students complimented the Anxiety Risk STAI questionnaire to delimit its anxiety levels. Said questionnaire was firstly described by Levitt in 1967 and includes self-evaluation scales to measure independently the anxiety as a state (S/A) and as a trait (T/A). Results show that collaborative work affects significantly the levels of anxiety, reducing them. We have checked that other variables affected the levels of anxiety. Finally, we want to point out that it is preliminary work, and we are going to complete the analysis with new variables, and increasing the sample.

Keywords:

Collaborative work, anxiety, STAI, COVID-19.