Brooke Curry (brookekellycurry@yahoo.com); Marinne Hammond (marinnekh@hotmail.com); Matthew Grendell (matthewgrendell@gmail.com)

While students communicate to writing centers that they feel less stressed following a session, there is little empirical data to support this claim. To address this gap, we conducted a survey in the Brigham Young University Family, Home, and Social Sciences Writing Lab (BYU FHSS Writing Lab). The survey was completed before and after a writing tutoring session by undergraduate students who attended the BYU FHSS Writing Lab to measure the effects of writing tutoring on stress, a relatable emotion of college students. More specifically, we wanted to better understand perceived stress in conjunction with other variables, such as year in school, familiarity with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether they had visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab in the past. We wanted to see how each of these variables were affected by a visit to the writing lab, and particularly how students' perceived stress levels were affected in turn. We discovered that visiting the BYU FHSS Writing Lab did significantly reduce perceived stress levels, and that many other factors play into this such as a student having a plan after their writing session or what year the student was in school. This research is important to writing labs across the country because by implementing our findings, writing centers may be able to maximize the help they provide to students and contribute to their stress relief.