Effects of journaling: a study on the benefits of journaling in Chinese adolescents with anxiety

Abstract

Academic performance plays a strong role in how Chinese students perceive their success throughout their adolescent years. As a result, this group of young people are left vulnerable to developing anxiety-related issues as they strive to perform better academically. The purpose of this study was to look at how journaling could potentially reduce the anxiety experienced in Chinese secondary school environments. It was hypothesized that students who received the journaling treatment would have lower levels of test-anxiety than those who did not. It was also hypothesized that students who had lower levels of anxiety would achieve higher grades than those with higher levels of anxiety. The results of this study suggest that journaling for 20 minutes did not have any effect on lowering anxiety levels or improving academic performance in Chinese adolescents. However, conducting a study on anxiety during COVID-19 may have made it difficult to accurately measure anxiety, thus, the results of this study are not supportive of previous research into this field. The potential to reduce test anxiety through journaling should be explored in future research when the educational environment returns to what it was prior to the pandemic.