The clock looming ominously at the front of the exam hall. The creeping sense of dread as you wait to turn over the exam paper. The questions swimming before your eyes as you become convinced that you haven’t done enough revision.

The nightmare of exams is something you never forget, even if you haven’t sat down to take one in years.

Figures released last summer by Childline revealed a 15 per cent spike in the number of counselling sessions with children and teens who were fearful about exam results compared with the previous year. And it’s girls who were more likely to ask for help, making up 74 per cent of those counselling sessions. What’s more, in a recent survey for Girlguiding, almost 30 per cent of young women aged 17 to 21 said they were unhappy - that’s a rise from 11 per cent in 2009. And 69 per cent of 11- to 21-year-old females cited exam anxiety as their main cause of stress.

The prevalence in girls of high exam anxiety - that is, the tendency to become anxious in situations where one’s performance will be judged or evaluated - has been a key focus for David Putwain, a professor in the School of Education at Liverpool John Moores University.

In a 2014 study (1), he and a colleague found that girls were significantly more likely to say they had test anxiety than boys. Putwain collected self-reported test anxiety data from 2,435 students in English schools who were preparing for their GCSEs. Of these, 16.4 per cent identified as being highly test-anxious. The proportion was significantly higher in girls (22.5 per cent) than boys (just over 10 per cent), so why the disparity?

Investigating the gender gap

While Putwain says there are no definitive conclusions, he offers some possibilities.

“Female students are more likely to report all kinds of [more] negative emotions around learning than male students - anger, hopelessness, frustration. It’s not limited to anxiety,” he explains. “One possibility is that female students are more likely to admit to, and report, anxiety than male students. This would imply that males are actually experiencing more frequent and strong anxiety but do not report it.

“There may be some truth in this, but it’s not as simple as a deliberate decision for males to report lower anxiety than they really feel.”

Putwain’s tentative conclusion is that boys do actually experience less exam anxiety than girls.

“This is partly a feature of masculine self-identity, where adolescent males are more likely to channel pressures externally through behaviour than females, who are more inclined to channel them internally through negative emotions,” he says.

“There are also differences in how males and females regulate their emotions. Female students are more likely see exams as a threat to their sense of self-worth, and that might be tied up to current social expectations of perfectionism in adolescent females, perhaps exacerbated by social media. So it’s a complex mix of factors.”

Boosting resilience

Putwain has also researched exam anxiety more broadly and its links with resilience, which here refers to the tendency to persist when experiencing difficulty, and the extent to which students can plan and control their learning. In a 2013 study (2), Putwain looked at primary schoolchildren but the research has been replicated in GCSE students.

“We took a measurement of [pupils]’ resilience and we also measured their anxiety around their Year 6 national curriculum tests,” he explains. “We also had scores from those tests when such things were available and we took a measure of non-verbal cognitive ability to control for differences in children’s academic abilities. We looked at whether resilient children were more or less test-anxious and then looked at how high-test-anxious children performed in their tests. We found that resilient children were less test-anxious and highly test-anxious children did worse in their national curriculum tests.

“So if you want to put that all together, you can say that resilient children did better in their national curriculum tests because they had lower test anxiety.”

How much of an impact can high test anxiety have on academic achievement? Well, it can be the difference between two GCSE grades, says Putwain.

“We did a study from a sample of around 1,600 children from six secondary schools, under the old GCSE grading system,” he says (3). “The difference between the high- and low-test-anxious subjects was two GCSE grades in maths, another two in English and another two in science. That’s massive: two GCSE grades is quite something.”

Whether gender or personality traits are the cause, Putwain believes there is plenty that teachers can do to improve pupils’ skills around coping with exam pressures - and this learning should be reinforced right the way through the GCSE trajectory.

“Anxiety is straightforward to manage; it’s not complicated,” he states. “I don’t want to belittle people’s attempts because quite often it’s the little things that are difficult to do. Generally, the resources for teachers in the UK are really poor but Ofqual has some good information on its blog (4), which is a step in the right direction.”

In the first instance, teachers must teach their pupils that stress can be both positive and negative - and how to recognise when it’s not doing them good. “The next step is controlling panic through simple breathing techniques,” Putwain says. “This does two things: it takes your attention away from what’s worrying you and it gives you the feeling of being in control. Because one of the characteristics of anxiety is feeling out of control.”

Pupils should also be taught how to recognise unhelpful negative beliefs, Putwain adds: “To recognise when they’re catastrophising, when they’re engaging in black-and-white thinking, to recognise when they’re engaging in perfectionist-type thoughts. All these thoughts will exacerbate anxiety.”

And, of course, there’s the issue of revision planning. “Show students how they can break a big subject down into smaller chunks and those smaller chunks into even smaller chunks,” Putwain advises. “You can’t do it for the student, but you can show them how to do it, progressing through each stage in a manageable way to foster a sense of control and confidence.”

Ultimately, Putwain insists that not all stress is bad. “Stress isn’t the same as anxiety. Some people respond really well to stress - not chronic stress, but the immediate stress of an exam. It makes them work harder,” he says. “Anxiety is when people respond badly to the pressure and that’s what we need to tackle.”

Christina Quaine is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 10 May 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Exam anxiety”