Conquering Test Anxiety

By Mike Griffiths
via ProjectManagement.com 01/31/2013

Research into test anxiety, its impact on test performance and strategies for intervention that were published in Science magazine in 2011 offer some valuable tools for boosting performance. It turns out there is a 10-minute exercise that has been found to significantly boost performance. Here is an excerpt from the research paper:

"Two laboratory and two randomized field experiments tested a writing intervention exercise designed to improve students' scores on high stakes exams…The intervention, a brief expressive writing assignment that occurred immediately before taking an important test, significantly improved student exam scores, especially for students habitually anxious about test taking. Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores."

For more information on this topic, as well as how Corporate Education Group can help optimize your organization's performance, contact us or call 1.800.288.7246 (US only) or +1.978.649.8200.

So, especially if you get nervous about important exams, this is a great tool for improving performance. Returning to the paper: "Studies have shown that when students feel an anxious desire to perform at a high level, they worry about the situation and its consequences. These worries compete for Working Memory (WM) available for performance. WM is a short-term memory system involved in the control and regulation of a limited amount of information immediately relevant to the task at hand. If the ability of WM to maintain task focus is disrupted because of situation-related worries, performance can suffer. Writing may alleviate the burden that worry places on WM, therefore improving performance."

This is a somewhat counterintuitive idea given that drawing attention to negative information typically makes it more rather than less salient in memory. However, in the experiments, ninth grade students were randomly assigned to an expressive writing or control condition immediately before the final exam of their high school career. Students spent 10 minutes either sitting quietly (control group) or engaged in expressive writing. The expressive writing group were asked to write as openly as possible about their thoughts and feelings regarding the exam they were about to perform. Control participants choked under the increased pressure, scoring on average 12 percent lower than earlier test scores; whereas students who expressed their thoughts before the high-pressure exam showed a significant 5 percent improvement on their pre-test scores.

This is a great improvement, from -12 to +15 percent under stressful conditions. The researches wondered if writing, regardless of content, distracted students' attention from the situation and thus benefited performance. So they did another experiment where one group was asked to write about anything they liked and the other group did the same expressive writing about the consequences of the exam. In this experiment, the unrelated writing group showed a 7 percent drop in performance from pre-test to final test, whereas the expressive writing group showed a 4 percent increase in performance this time.

So, it's not just writing that does the trick. Making a shopping list or drafting your project's next status report is not going to help you; you have to actually think and write openly about the exam. How do you feel about it? What would happen if you fail? Who would you need to tell? How would people react at work? All the gritty stuff we may be telling ourselves not to think about... that's exactly what we should be writing about to free up as much working memory as possible.

It seems Working Memory capacity is key for answering questions and is eroded by anxiety. Exercises like 10 minutes of expressive writing could be very useful tools for improving performance. Facing your fears and documenting them will unload them from Working Memory, giving you more to solve problems with.

Test are bad enough, but if you are one of the 40 percent of people that suffer from test anxiety (that panic of "Argg, I have forgotten it all!"), this 10-minute exercise could be just the ticket. You should be arriving at the test center in plenty of time anyway, just in case there is traffic or delays. So use that wait time effectively to your advantage.

For more information on this topic, as well as how Corporate Education Group can help optimize your organization's performance, contact us or call 1.800.288.7246 (US only) or +1.978.649.8200.

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