~Prompt 1~

Our research topic was stress and how it interacts with the way that people are able to complete work, as well as workload’s effect on stress. In our research, we surveyed 40 people on this topic and found clear correlations linking high amounts of stress with a high workload, and a significant majority of participants stating an increase in difficulty regarding completion of work while under large amounts of stress. This lines up with research from other sources that we’ve found (all sources listed on poster) creating a definite tie between high amounts of work and difficulty completing work. This information is relevant and important for a variety of groups, including teachers, students, as well as those in charge of employees.

From our results I believe that teachers should try to more actively be conscious of the amount of work that they assign, as especially at Western with the shorter classes in the quarter system lots of assignments can stack up really fast leading to high amounts of stress among students leading to high amounts of difficulty completing work. It ought to be in the best interest of those providing education to make sure that the students are able to participate in learning and drowning them in work ultimately makes everything worse for everyone involved.

This responsibility isn’t only on those responsible for teaching however, as something can be said for students as well. Given our findings students should be wary of taking on too much work, especially those with jobs. Taking too many work-heavy classes can result in difficulty completing work for all classes due to the stress that would come from such an undergoing. Those with jobs need to balance that separate workload as well, as losing time to complete schoolwork can lead to a pileup of things to do which will cause stress and make things even harder.

Speaking of jobs, there’s something to be said for the validity of our findings in a work environment that those in charge of managing employees could serve to understand. Simply, overworked employees will produce lower-quality or slower work than they would given a smaller workload making things more difficult for both parties.

With all this said, everyone has a different amount of work that they would consider to be “too much” before they start getting very stressed so there is no perfect solution. At the end of the day, the most important thing to take from our research is to be fair to yourself and those who you are responsible for regarding workload, as it can snowball out of one’s control fairly easily given enough of it.