SEATTLE – A simple writing exercise can relieve students of test anxiety and may help them get better scores than their less anxious classmates, a new study has found.
The report in today’s edition of the journal Science says students who spend 10 minutes before an exam writing about their thoughts and feelings can free up brainpower previously occupied by testing worries and do their best work.
“We essentially got rid of this relationship between test anxiety and performance,” said Dr. Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study with graduate student Gerardo Ramirez.
Psychologists, educators and parents have known for a long time that the way students perform on a test does not necessarily indicate what knowledge they bring to the table. Test anxiety is fairly common in classrooms, especially in the United States because of its “increasingly test-obsessed culture,” Beilock said.
Test anxiety can lead to poorer grades and lower scores on standardized tests and college entrance exams, which can condemn talented students to inferior colleges.
Laura Brady of Basking Ridge, N.J., had a high level of test anxiety as a student. She remembers walking out of a linear algebra study session in college because she thought she was having a heart attack.
She called her mother, who helped Brady, 44, talk her way through her anxiety: “I’m sure she said stuff like, ‘At the end of the day, does it matter how you do on this test?’”
