Test Anxiety

What is the most frequently reported student emotion in the college classroom? You might have guessed it: Anxiety.

 

Why is anxiety so pervasive? Here’s what Sarah Rose Cavanagh has to say in Chapter 6 of The Spark of Learning: “…there are just so many things to be anxious about: performance anxiety when giving group presentations, anxiety about speaking in class, anxiety about not being smart enough to master the material and, of course, anxiety about tests, quizzes, and grades.” I try to allay student anxieties about speaking by giving them time to think after a question is posed, the opportunity to discuss with their classmates, and I encourage them to write something down so they don’t have to speak extemporaneously. I give plenty of low-stakes five-minute quizzes (typically dropping a third of the lowest scores).

 

But the big one is test or exam anxiety. I’ve given practice self-tests and provided past-year exams, and I’m presently experimenting with providing more practice through study guides. Still, the students are anxious and this is no surprise. In reviewing the literature, Cavanagh identifies two general causes: “cognition-based worry about assessment, and physiologically based emotional arousal”. Turns out most of the research on test anxiety is on math anxiety. It’s quite common, and I certainly see it in my chemistry courses. Essentially, “students high in math anxiety take longer to solve problems and perform less well than students low in math anxiety… [and] avoid mathematics courses and careers there math is involved”. I attribute this mostly to confidence or lack thereof. But the effects are observable: the worrying steals away cognitive resources that should otherwise have gone to problem-solving.

 

Cavanagh cites a number of studies (see her book for details and references). The one that jumped out of me looked at the correlation between cortisol levels and performance in solving “large math problems”. Interestingly, high-anxiety students with higher cortisol levels did worse, while low-anxiety students with higher cortisol did better. Apparently you have to be somewhat aroused/engaged (higher cortisol) and also have sufficient working memory cognitive resources (i.e., not stolen away by anxiety) to perform well. Lower cortisol was associated with being bored and unmotivated.

 

What to do about this? Cavanagh has four suggestions: (1) Give students more time so they don’t feel rushed especially if they are slower math-problem solvers. I’m reminded that I need to take another close look at my P-Chem exams. I sometimes forget that even though the students have supposedly had math practice from the prerequisite calculus and physics courses, that this math-anxiety can actually be even more pronounced. (2) Encourage mindfulness in students. Hmm… I haven’t done anything here. (3) Be transparent and clear both in the syllabi and in teaching. I’d like to think I do a good job here. The vast majority of my students rate highly my level of organization and clarity. (4) Expose students to your testing style. I’d like to think I do a good job here, certainly in providing both examples and opportunities in multiple contexts. But students don’t always take advantage of these or they don’t take seriously the self-annotation assignments.

 

Chapter 6 in Cavanagh’s book also brought up a term I was unfamiliar with: “psychological reactance”. This has to do with negative emotions when students “perceive an unjust infraction… [and] report feeling angry, pained, frustrated, stressed, violated, cheated, disgusted and embarrassed.” This can lead to things in the classroom going downhill very quickly. It is exacerbated when students know each other outside of class (“hyperbonding” – another new term for me) and this can lead them to “encourage each other to greater heights of rebellion”. I have had the good fortune not to have personally experienced this, but I have heard the stories and I’ve personally known colleagues who found themselves in this situation. It’s a real problem, and while sometimes the instructor carries some of the blame, that’s not always true, and the rebellion is often disproportionate to the perceived injustice. I suspect being male protects me somewhat from this. Students know I have a different national origin but it’s not one they’re familiar with and they likely have not developed stereotypes about it.

 

Cavanagh discusses how to reduce psychological reactance: (1) “…use language that is low in threat or demands, expressing empathy and interpersonal similarity…” I’m not sure what to make of this. I don’t think I make threats or demands. I think I’m clear about what students need to be doing to be successful in my class. (My advice isn’t always followed.) And I don’t sense interpersonal similarity with my students. It’s stark to me that given my different background, I’m very different from them. (2) “… paying attention to the power dynamics of the classroom…” Honestly, I hadn’t thought about that very much. Maybe I need to pay more attention. Cavanagh goes through different types of power, those that are favorably and unfavorably viewed by students. I don’t have much to say about this mostly out of my own ignorance. Cavanagh did give me something to ponder here.

 

The title of Chapter 6 is “Best Laid Plans: When Emotions or Challenge Backfire” and Cavanagh ends her book by reminding us that students have emotional lives that intersect with their learning even when those things seem disconnected to their academics at first glance. It’s a reminder that we deal with human beings, many of whom are adolescents with emotional highs and lows and who deal with varying degrees of uncertainty about their present and future life. As someone who is over-the-hill, and does not experience those huge emotional shifts, I should be cognizant that my students are dealing with so much else. I can do my best as a teacher and learning might still be sub-optimal. But I should keep trying. And so should my students.