Anxiety is a mood affective disorder occurring across all life stages. Some authors believe that the symptoms of anxiety are more common among younger children, while others claim that as children grow older, they develop cognitive abilities, such as social cognition, worry, perception about possible negative events in the future etc., which can consequently increase their anxiety. Anxiety often occurs when individuals feel that they do not meet the demands of the communities that represent social norms. If the individual does not comply with these norms, a punishment can follow. The punishment can be physical, verbal or internalized and can have an impact on the development of social anxiety. Students experience different levels of anxiety in school every day. They can reduce anxiety if they learn the strategies of successful learning, the processes of solving certain tasks, techniques of memorization, planning, control and evaluation of learning activities etc. In 2020, covid-19 epidemic started to spread around the world, which has changed our lives. In Slovenia and around the world, the educational institutions were closed, so students changed classroom learning with online learning from home. All concerns and limitations that the epidemic brought, such as isolation from friends and teachers, distance learning, anxiety about getting infected or about spreading the virus to someone else etc., have left psychological consequences on people. In the master's thesis, we want to present definitions and symptoms of anxiety and make an empirical research to find out, to what degree anxiety occurs among high-school students in Ljubljana during the epidemic and distance learning compared to pre-epidemic time. We wanted to find out in which school situations anxiety most often occurs and what are anxiety self-regulation strategies in students. The research was of descriptive nature and was based on quantitative methodology. 139 high-school male and female students of different ages from different high schools in Ljubljana participated. They had to assess degree of their anxiety during a class at school and during an online class. At the beginning of the research, we made 3 hypotheses. Our first hypothesis (H1) was that there are no statistically significant differences between male and female students in experiencing anxiety during the covid-19 epidemic, our second hypothesis (H2) was that there are no statistically significant differences between male and female students in using anxiety self-regulation strategies and the third one (H3) was that the students experience statistically higher amount of anxiety during the covid-19 epidemic compared to pre-epidemic time when they were having classes in school. We rejected H2 hypothesis, because there are statistically significant differences between male and female high school students in using anxiety self-regulation strategies. We confirmed the other two hypotheses. H1 hypothesis was confirmed because we found out that there are no statistically significant differences between male and female students in experiencing anxiety during the covid-19 epidemic. H2 hypothesis confirmed that the experience of anxiety in students is significantly increased during the covid-19 epidemic compared to pre-epidemic time. We found out that for approximately 30% of the students, online learning causes negative feelings in them and that they would rather have classes at school, while approximately 35% of the students think that they feel good during online classes and that they want to continue with online classes until the end of the school year.
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