Speaker
Description
This concept paper aims to examine the relationship between anxiety and academic performance among counselling students at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS). University students often experience heightened anxiety due to academic pressures, social adjustments, and future uncertainties, which may negatively influence their cognitive functioning and learning outcomes. Despite increasing global attention on student mental health, limited research has explored this relationship specifically within counselling education in Malaysia’s multicultural context. Guided by Zeidner’s Anxiety Theory and Achievement Goal Theory, this study adopts a quantitative, cross-sectional research design to investigate how anxiety impacts academic task performance. The Academic Anxiety Scale (AAS) and Academic Task Performance Scale (ATPS) will be utilized to measure the independent and dependent variables respectively, while gender and socioeconomic status (SES) will be examined as moderating factors. Data will be collected via an online questionnaire distributed to counselling students in the Faculty of Psychology and Social Work at UMS. Statistical analysis using SPSS 29.0 will include descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, independent t-tests, and ANOVA to determine the strength and significance of relationships between variables. The findings are expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of how anxiety influences academic performance, inform intervention strategies for student support, and provide empirical evidence to enhance counselling education and student well-being within Malaysian higher education institutions.
