University teaching and stress recognition: an experimental intervention to improve student grades

While most university students experience stress, few often accurately recognize their own response to stressors. Students need to know their real stress level to optimize their response to stressors and achieve the best performance. This article measures the effects of journaling on student outcomes at a medium-sized Midwest university. For one semester, 3 randomly selected class sections were asked to journal each class period while 3 class sections were used as a control group. Treatment improves student performance on exams by 5.3 percentage points. Increases in stress recognition drive this result. After better understanding their stress levels through journaling, students optimized their response to ­stressors and increased their overall stress levels on average. We also find weak evidence that treatment increased students’ metacognition skills.