THE IMPACT OF THE ACADEMIC OVERLOAD ON STUDENTS’ WELL BEING IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN SOUTH LEBANON
Keywords:
students’ wellbeing; students’ mental health; students’ physical health; academic overload; information overload; academic stress or stressorsAbstract
This research aims to investigate the impact of academic overload on students’ well-being in grade 12 “LS section” in secondary schools in the three districts of South Lebanon “Saida, Tyr & Nabatiyeh”. A sequential explanatory design using a descriptive methodology through quantitative analysis and based on deductive analysis to identify from a sample of 119 students “Appendix E” belonging to 7 high schools from the public and private sectors, if the grade 12 students are academically overloaded and by which type then to relate this overload if proved to students’ wellbeing “mental and physical health”; the next step that follows is focused group interviews for teachers and students of grade 12 “LS” in addition to the school counsellor through open-ended questions. This unprejudiced study detected that students are academically overloaded by information overload and that when the overload decrease, the score of both mental and physical health will improve significantly. Our findings indicated that the information overload can create in some of the secondary students a distress thus transforming into an academic stressor that can negatively impact the students’ Quality of Life (QOL) and consequently impacting their psychological and physical well-being. These results can be used for revising the curriculum in schools for each subject course in order to subtract any unnecessary added information in addition to the alignment of assignments and quizzes by teachers during the week; anything that can favor the decrease of the academic overload therefore the academic stress and thus enhancing students’ wellbeing.