Year 6 Children S Emotions Towards the KS2 Sats, What Are the Symptoms of Depressive Emotions?

Year 6 children’s emotions towards the KS2 SATs, What are the symptoms of depressive emotions?

Boyuan Xiao, Child researcher

Abstract

Children face a great amount of targets during primary school education; perhaps the most academically symbolic one would be the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs). The main emphasis in this research attempt was to find out children’s emotions before they take the test. Underlying trends, such as how gender, birthday months and school status were explored, also, I investigated what judgement can negative emotions cause.

Data were collected via a questionnaire. Participants only numbered 69, so results maybe far from representative. The schools were of contrasting status and children include a large variety of birthday months and equal amounts of gender differences.

The findings were surprising and contradicted the research papers I have read, especially the lack of gender or birthday month caused negative emotions.

Introduction

Many things have influenced me to research this issue, primarily because I, at the time was about to take the SATs myself, secondarily, Mary Kellet has done an interview about children’s emotions after the SATs which greatly interested me.

Main research questions include children’s specific emotions and the subjects they are most concerned about.

Many researchers have investigated this or topics similar, therefore we have accumulating evidence that has shown that children’s emotions often become negative due to the pressure to do well, and the preparation beforehand. Also, the status of the school seems to affect their emotions, along with gender and birthday months. Sturman, L., 2003 et al, Cropley M., and Locker J., 2004 have all argued that females suffer from anxiety before tests, and that the poorer the statuses of a school, its participants have more negative emotions. Anonymous researchers from the Open University have said younger children think they are less capable.

My research questions are:

What emotions do children have towards the SATs?
How important do they think the SATs are to their future?
Do they think pressure has increased on year 6 children?
Which subjects are children most children concerned about?
Do the gender; age and type of school the child goes to affect their emotions?
Does the children think pressure have increased on them?

Please note that though this paper is written in the form of one to ‘make a difference’, I need to broaden my research o provide evidence of my results.

Methodology

Before any means to find out data were carried out, my supervisor Mrs Wood gave to me 2 research papers of past researchers that researched similar or same topics. I read these and was able to draw up a new topic for my research, for whether having no confidence can cause a child’s emotions to affect his judgement of things in relation.

I was also able to think of a hypothesis:

Lower status of a school would indicate less confident emotions.
Younger children would be less confident.
SATs would be viewed as an important event.
Pressure would be thought to increase on year 6 pupils.

The questionnaire I intended giving out, which is the primary way off collecting data in this research project, was first sent to fellow children researchers in the Open University as a trial.

Data was collected from 2 different schools. In order to keep them anonymous, I will refer to them throughout the paper as school A, which has 163 more points on 2004 league tables than school B. 32 questionnaires were collected from school A, and 37 from school B.

This was because (2004 Locker and Cropley, et al) explained that the background of the school at GCSE level, would effect the children’s emotions. Their results indicated that private schools would have more anxious children; I also wished to investigate whether the status of primary schools might affect children’s feelings.

I was unable to observe the process of the participants filling in the questionnaires.

With help from Mrs Alison Wood I was able to analyse the data collected and converted them first into tables, then bar graphs.

All ethical issues were taken into consideration; prior permission was given from the headmistresses of the schools data was collected from. Questionnaires were anonymous and ethical issues were brought up during the trial questionnaires were tested out. (A sample of the blank questionnaire can be found in appendix 1):

Various questions in the questionnaire did not seem to have relevancy to the research questions; they are listed below with their reasons for being included:

Question 1: gender

(Sturman, L, 2003) Has found out that the gender of a child affects his emotions; this is particular true in females, which seems more concerned as indicated in her findings.

Question 2: Birthday month:

Mary Kellet has found out that the birthday month of a child also has an influence on her emotions, children born in later months are found to be less confident. (In Appendices 2 a table is made showing any relationships.

Question 4: I do not think year 6 children should be expected to do SATs (Agreement question).

Non-confidence might lead to thinking the SATs should not be taken at all, or in a simpler form.

Question 5: I do not think there should be a time limit. (Agreement question)

The time limit might be one of the causes of nervousness; I wished to establish a connection between non-confidence and objection to the time limit rule, if there is any.

The participants were given 5 different categories for the agreement questions (question 3-question 6), they were strongly agreed, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree and strongly disagree. The participants were asked to circle for question 1, 2 and 7. They were asked to give their answers in a numeric scale of 1 to 5 to represent their confidence of the core subjects (Q.8), 1 for worried, 5 for confidant.

Findings

: Question 3: I think SATs are important to my future.

Question 3: I think SATs are important to my future. (School B)

Question 4: I do not think year 6 children should be expected to do SATs. (School B)

Question 5: I do not think there should be a time limit.

Question 5: I do not think there should be a time limit (School B)

Question 6: I think pressure on year children has increased over the past years

Question 6: I think pressure on year children has increased over the past years (School B)

Question 7: Emotions:

Emotion / Percentage (1=3.125%)
Apprehensive / 6.25
Optimistic / 18.75
Concerned / 6.25
Confident / 43.75
Worried / 18.75
Positive / 21.75
Nervous / 37.5
Encouraged / 21.75
Other / 21.75

Question 7: Emotions (School B)

Emotion / Percentage, Percentage will be over 100 because participants are allowed to circle more than 1 emotion (1=2.70%)
Apprehensive / 43.20%
Optimistic / 35.10%
Concerned / 35.10%
Confident / 35.10%
Worried / 35.80%
Positive / 35.10%
Nervous / 62.10%
Encouraged / 16.20%
Other / 0%

Question 8: Levels of confidence (School B)

Question 8: subjects and their levels of concern

Discussion

Interesting and key Results, comparison and contrast

The main issue and difference in this research would be Q7, when the children had to fill in their emotions, circling more than one if emotions are mixed. The participants of both schools all felt nervous, though there were many emotions mixed with it. The majority of mixed feelings were confident from school A, and apprehensive from School B. My supervisor and helper Alison Wood said initially a few children from the school B were unable to understand the more complicated vocabulary, though they were defined to them.

The participants from both schools seem to agree or strongly agree that the SATs are an important event to their future. Interestingly, many children that answered in a positive way to this question did not seem to be concerned, especially at school A.

In school A, 2 out of 11 children who were more than 50% negative answered in a positive manner when asked whether there should be a time limit. In school B, 12 out of 20 pupils who were more than 50% negative answered there should not be a time limit. However, the possibility of answering “disagree” to this question might cause a double negative confusion.

However, 0 out of the 11 from school A and only 6 out of 20 children from school B thought SATs should be reserved for older pupils, though most answered ‘Neither agree or disagree to his question.

Both schools’ participants thought that pressure has increased on children of their age.

Very interestingly, the gender difference was not significant, analysing shows that 74.3% of females are negative or mixed negative, whether 76.7% of boys were negative. However, 48.6% of females were over 50% negative, while only 43.3% males are.

Interestingly again, there was lack of difference between children born in September & October and July & August. In fact, when taking mixed feelings into consideration, it was 8/13 for Sep and Oct and 5/9 for July and Aug (equivalent fractions: 65/117<72/117). Though when only analysing over 50% negative children, Sep and Oct had had 5/13 negative children and July and Aug had 4/9 (equivalent fractions: 45/117<52/117.)

Implications and theoretical reasoning

As referred to by both research papers I have read, it is likely that school B’s participants were less confident because the school’s results are relatively low, on the other hand, school A’s participants would be confident because of the school’s relatively high results. The implications of this are many, for we can also see that participants of both schools were nervous, if only mixed.

The reason most people did not think SATs should be reserved for older children would be because they think the rest of the year group will manage it. Or, the results from school A might be affected by the fact they know the person collecting the data. Thus neither agree nor disagree indicate a positive answer, as while they do think it is too hard, knowledge of me might influence them.

The fact that there is very little connections between thinking SATs are important and being concerned can be explained. If we look at thinking SATs are important leads to determination to do well, and therefore a reason for high self-expectations. (1990, Meyers, et al 1978) has explained low self-expectation will result in poor performance, high performance, will inevitably lead to good results, thus gaining confidence from practice papers (2003, Sturman, et al).

The birthday months differences is startling, contradicting Dr. Kellet M.’s research, maybe the stereotypical view of young and old children that causes differences is rare at this stage. Or, my results could have been without a suitable amount of representation.

Females are said to display increasing levels of anxiety, but research papers have shown it increases most at GCSEs time where it can lead to depression though they display it more than males. This, however, also implies that boys have more nervous mixed feelings.

In school A, the negative students not objecting the time limit restriction could simply imply time limits are not a serious consideration in more advanced schools.

With the results collected from question 4 and 5, it seems that negative emotions towards the SATs cause to doing them and the restrictions, however, the interviews Mary Kellet took shows that most children would like to take SATs as a series of assessments marked by their teacher.

We can see that the majority of children are worried about the subject the students did not do well in the previous year. This implies that they believe they cannot do well on this subject either when they sit the SATs; the cause for this might be that results from last year were revealed to them.

Which leads on to our next topic of discussion, (Extract from Sturman L.’s paper): ‘Another potentially useful resource is the KS2 Standards Report (see QUA 2001a), which is provided free each year to schools registered in the tests. It contains, amongst other things, analysis of pupil performance in the most recent national tests for each of the core subjects. These highlight areas where pupils have performed well, and areas where weaknesses are apparent. All but one of the 64 respondents was aware of the performance in the 2000 science tests. This represents 69 per cent of the 61 respondents who prepared, and is much higher than the 10-20 per cent who used the report of the 1997 tests (Emery et al, 1998)’.

Growing numbers of teachers reading the KS2 Standards Report will inevitably lead to more reports to children/parents, thus the children feel more pressure over the years.

Conclusion

It shows from this article that results of the school in the past can cause the most negative emotions. Negative feelings can cause severe poor performance in tests, as they rate their own abilities lower than teachers will (1990, Mayers ET al., 1987) thus risking subsequently negative effect on test performance. (Zeindner and Schleyer 1998, et al) describe how individuals feeling less academically confident may have lower expectations of success, which may in turn lead to increased test or exam related anxiety and result in a poorer performance.

However, the data was taken from only 69 children, therefore the results are far from representative. If this project was to be carried out more officially, various things can be improved (Listed below):

Double negative confusion not included in questionnaire.
Question of whether SATs should be taken in a different form added.
Interviews used to find out questions which if asked in the questionnaire would be loaded.

This all indicates schools should not share negative results with children before the test, rather, they can compare the positive difference and thus resulting in higher results each time.

Appendices

1Sample of SATs questionnaire (empty):

SATs Questionnaire

I am doing some research about yr 6 children’s emotions before they take the KS2 SATs, the information collected from this questionnaire will be analysed thoroughly, but will remain anonymous. Thank you very much for your help.

You do not have to fill in any questions you do not wish to answer, but please read the questions carefully.

Gender: Female/male
Birthday month: ………………..
I think SATs are important to my future.

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree or disagree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree

4. I do not think year 6 children should be expected to do SATs

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree or disagree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree

5. I do not there should be a time limit.

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree or disagree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree

6. I think pressure on year 6 children has increased over the past years.

Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree or disagree / Disagree / Strongly Disagree

7. Circle the word that best describes your emotions towards. (You may

circle more than one.)

Apprehensive Optimistic Concerned Confident Worried Nervous

Encouraged Other

If you have circled other, please specify:……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

8. Please rate the tests in the SATs from 1 to 5, 1 for worried, 5 for confident.

English

Math

Science

References

Locker, J. and Cropley, M., Anxiety, Depression and Self Esteem in Secondary School children, 2004 SAGE publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. 25(3): 333-345.

Sturman, L., Teaching to the test: science or intuition?, Roultledge, Education Research Vol. 45 No.3 Winter 2003 261-273.

Meyers, N. E., Dyck, D.G and Petrinack, R.J (1987’Cognitive Appraisal and Attributional Correlates of Depressive Symptoms in Children’, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 17: 325-36.

Zeidner, M. and Schleyer, E.J. (1998) “The Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect for Academic Self Concept, Test Anxiety and school Grades in Gifted Children’, Contemporary Educational Psychology 24:305-29.

Emery, H., Wilmut, J. and Fox, R. (1998). Monitoring Assessment at Key Stage 2 in 1998: Report to the Qualification and Curriculum Authority. London: QCA.