Abstract:

The issue of academic stress is based on the concept of general stress, is related to the university environment, and affects students’ (also teachers’ and other people’s) mental well-being as well as the climate and atmosphere of the environment. Academic stress can be understood as excessive load or demands exerted on the actors in the academic environment, which exceeds their ability to cope with these requirements. It appears that for students the most stressful are interpersonal, educational and social aspects related to their transition to university and their effort to remain at university. As a result, academic stress appears to be one of the key mechanisms that co-determines the resulting quality of academic functioning in university students. In this context, the following research questions were formulated: “What is the degree of perceived academic stress in university students of teacher training courses?” and “In what ways is the degree of perceived academic stress affected by gender and formal study characteristics?” The research sample comprised 539 university students from the faculties of education (mean age = 22.8, SD = 6.53), of whom 57 were male (mean age = 26.4, SD = 9.09) and 482 female (mean age = 22.4, SD = 6.03). The research method was a new 17-item questionnaire called The Academic Stress Inventory (ASI, Novotný & Křeménková, 2020), which uses 4 subscales (Stress related to study requirements; Work/Life balance; Organizational and social aspects of study; Expectation of good performance) on a 5-point Likert scale to identify the degree of experienced academic stress. The reliability of the questionnaire subscales equals ω = 0.813, 0.823, 0.648 and 0.66. The data were analysed in SPSS 21 using descriptive statistics calculation, Pearson correlation analysis, calculation of age-adjusted standardized scores (standardized linear regression residues), t-tests, and factorial analysis of variance. The study was conducted in compliance with applicable ethical principles. According to the standardized “z” scores of all age-adjusted variables, the results of one-dimensional analyses showed that the study requirements values significantly differed by gender (p= 0.002), the work/life balance values differed by field of study (p= 0.018), organizational and social aspects differed by gender (p= 0.008) and field of study (p= 0.047), and finally the expectation of good performance values differed by gender (p= 0.000). The statistically significant model (F(3, 531) = 7.946, p = 0.037, adj. R2 = 0.010) of the factorial analysis of variance (2-Way ANOVA) showed that in terms of the two predictors inserted into the model (gender, field of study), the organizational and social aspects of study were significantly affected only by field of study (p= 0.038). The effect of predictor interaction was insignificant.

Keywords:

Academic stress, university students, teachers.