1. Examination stress in Singapore primary schoolchildren: how compliance by subjects can impact on study results.
- Author
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Parker, G., Cai, Y., Tan, S., Dear, K., Henderson, A. S., Poh, G. T., and Kwee, G. C.
- Subjects
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PSYCHOLOGY of school children - Abstract
Objective: Examinations are anecdotally viewed as extremely stressful to Singapore schoolchildren. We test this postulate by obtaining parental ratings of children's emotional stress levels longitudinally in a large representative sample of sixth (P6) and fifth (P5) class primary schoolchildren, respectively, exposed and unexposed to a streaming examination. Method: Children's stress levels were rated monthly by a parent for 10 months. Results: Analyses failed to find evidence of any differential stress impact across P6 and P5 comparison groups, apart from a subset of P6 children whose parents complied with every monthly survey. Conclusion: The streaming examination in the final year of primary school did not emerge as a general stressor to children, but achieved salience within a defined subset of children whose parents were highly study compliant. Study compliance may be a proxy variable of some import, and have wider relevance to other cohort studies and to intervention trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2003
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