A Comparative Study of the Worries of Children in Two School Situations

Abstract

This study reports results obtained by means of a What Do You Worry About? inventory that was administered to fifth and sixth grade pupils in the New York City Elementary Schools.* Population Studied. The pupils represented two groups of schools. Schools in one group had officially adopted, and were putting into practice, an program, based upon progressive or newer theories of education. This experiment with newer educational prac tices has been described in several earlier publications.** In the other group were schools that had not officially adopted the activity program and, to varying degrees, maintained the conventional program. The present study represents a minor undertaking in connection with series of more compre hensive investigations of the activity and con trol schools. The extent of the difference between the two groups of schools has been studied by various means in earlier investigations.*** The findings in all of these studies show sig nificant differences in many particulars between representative schools in the two groups. These differences are, of course, more marked in the case of some pairs of classes than in the case of others, but, by and large, the differences are quite substantial. In gen eral it may be said that the activity classes are less formal, offer more freedom for chil dren to express themselves, to exercise their interests and initiative, to work on independ ent projects, to participate more freely in the planning and execution of the work of the class. It was partly by virtue of these demon strated differences that the present study was undertaken to find whether there might be differences in the amount of emotional ten sion or strain associated with the two educa tional regimes, as revealed by children's own reports concerning their worries. The pupils in the present study represent a selection of one class at the fifth and sixth grade levels in each of eight pairs activity and control schools. In each school in which there were two or more classes at the fifth or the sixth grade levels, the principal was asked to designate the class that represented the highest average ability. In other words, the pupils here involved are somewhat supe rior to the average fifth and sixth grade public school populations, although this degree of selectivity is perhaps not a very important factor, for several reasons. In some instances there was not a significant difference between the class that was selected and other classes at the same grade level. Apart from this, the factor of academic ability is perhaps less im portant, as far as worries are concerned, than other uncontrolled factors, such as the per sonality of the teacher, the rapport that ex isted between the pupils and the teacher, the homogeniety of the groups, the morale of the class, and so forth. The children included in the study number 569 boys and girls in activity classes and 555 in control classes.