The Relationship Between Academic Performance and Anxiety: A Multi-Angle Review

Abstract

Academic pressure has always been a tremendous topic. With the world marching into the second decade of the 21st century, one cannot identify a single element that is affecting peoples pressure and mood. The bond between students mental health and academic performance has caused many researches which explore the potential negative outcome of unproductive and damaging relational circulation. This paper strives to discover the relationship between academic performance and anxiety from a multi-level analysis, including but not limited to Social-Emotional Competency (SEC), family conditions and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Through collecting data from different sources that examined students mental health status and academic performance under various circumstances and cultural backgrounds, this paper finds that stress and anxiety are negatively correlated with academic performance if they are not properly coped with; different factors like language barriers and current COVID-19 pandemic, for example, can exaggerate the effect of anxiety on academic performance in different subgroups of students from different cultures. This paper calls for more attention to students mental health under current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as those who are under high-intensity studying environment with limited psychological and social resources.