Coping with Assignment Overload in High School: A Student's Guide

This assignment explores the issue of assignment overload faced by high school students, providing a comprehensive guide to managing the overwhelming workload. The document identifies the reasons behind student struggles, including lack of time, skills, and interest, as well as the negative impacts of overload like stress, failure, and potential depression. It offers practical solutions such as time management techniques, planning strategies, working in intervals, seeking help when needed, group study, utilizing guidebooks, setting rewards, balancing activities, making timelines, and seeking guidance from teachers. The guide emphasizes the importance of starting tasks on time, avoiding procrastination, and staying ahead of deadlines to achieve academic success and maintain a healthy balance. The document references several academic papers to support its claims and offers the readers with a well-rounded approach to address the challenges of assignment overload.

How to cope with assignment
overload in high school
Name
Professor
Course
Date

Introduction
Unlike primary schools, high school level has more
workload
This comes in form of study content and
assignments
Students are somehow independent of external
assistance such as from teachers or parents
Teachers evaluate the students’ understanding with
lots of assignments (shahmohammadi, 2011).
Lack of knowledge on how to manage these
assignments may put students in problems
Thus, it becomes necessary to learn how to manage

Reasons why students struggle with
assignments
Lack of enough time to manage the many
assignments
Lack of necessary skills for managing the
assignments
Lack of interest in tackling assignments
Procrastination
Piling up work
Lack of balance in curriculum, co-curriculum
and free time
Too many assignments from teachers

Impact of assignment overload on the
student
Feeling overburdened
Feeling stressed
Feeling that one may be unable to complete
the work
Failure to seek guidance may make a student
an academic failure
Lack of a solution may lead to depression or
dropping out of school

Disadvantages of piling up work
Leads to assignment overload
Leads to time wastage (Scheff, & Monson,
2019).
One never recovers lost time
Assignments are handed in late
Low grades are obtained for doing
assignments in haste and rush
Students fail in overall grade
Failure to finish up on other tasks

A point to teachers
Too much assignments does not measure
student intellect
Help students to learn managing their time
Assignments need to be tailored towards
student needs
Offer homework that can be managed by
students (shahmohammadi, 2011).
Provide guidelines and encourage learners to
make consultation at all times

Ways of managing assignment workload
1. Start on time
Avoid delaying tasks by starting to work on
them when there is time
This enables one to avoid task piling
It makes one work on tasks without haste
Completing certain work percentage in time
gives students morale and motivation to finish
others

2. Plan your assignments
Planning makes one focused and measures
progress
Set short and long term milestones using a
work schedule
A work plan acts as a reminder
Start with assignments that are easy to
manage
Start with those having less time

3. Work in small intervals
Sitting for long hours kills morale and
increases tiredness
Consider taking 20 minute walks to refresh
the body (Pope, Brown, & Miles, 2015).
This also helps regain energy
After rest one can work again for 2 hours
consecutively

4. Get help once stuck
Some assignments may be challenging to
tackle
Seek help from close friends, siblings or the
teachers
This avoids being demotivated to continue
It makes one encouraged to finish up with
assignments
Set difficult assignments aside for a while
and work on the other simple ones

5. Contact group study
It helps to have group studies at home or at
school in the evening
They help encourage one another than when
one is working along (shahmohammadi,
2011).
They may involve students of different
levels/classes but the common goal motivates
One may consult those in higher levels
Students should not copy assignments from
each other

6. Using guidebooks
Guidebooks contain similar assignments and
samples given as a guide
Students need to have plenty of guidebooks
to consult them when they are stuck
One can work on given examples and see
whether he/she gets same results
Compare different guidebooks for more
experience
One can also research online