This article was originally published on 29 March 2023

No one likes being assessed or receiving less-than-positive feedback. It’s for that reason I will be approaching the Facebook comments beneath this article with a good deal of caution.

For some students, however, the stress of being assessed is debilitating - and simply telling them “don’t read the comments” isn’t an option.

In fact, if your classes are anything like mine, you might be seeing more and more students suffering from high levels of test anxiety before GCSE or A-level exams. Some estimates suggest that nearly a quarter of all students may struggle with this.

But what is test anxiety? What makes it more extreme for some young people? And how can teachers help their students to overcome its effects?

“Test anxiety” is defined by psychologist Irwin Sarason as “an anxiety condition focused on evaluative situations”. It’s usually thought to arise from a heightened “rejection sensitivity” - that is, sensitivity to the threat of being rejected in evaluative assessment situations, which emphasise rank and status.

The effects of test anxiety in exams

In addition to causing distress, test anxiety can have severe negative effects on academic outcomes. This stems from cognitive overload; when a chunk of our limited working capacity is occupied with performance worries, we have less of it available to process the target information. This reduces the effectiveness of both a student’s preparation for, and performance in, tests.

Addressing the effects of test anxiety is, therefore, not only a wellbeing aim for schools but also an issue of social equality. Students from lower socio-economic status backgrounds have been consistently shown to have higher levels of test anxiety, which consequently impairs their academic performance.

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In attempting to tackle the problem, researchers have tested a variety of techniques. For a 2017 review, Brenna Quinn and Anya Peters explored a range of strategies to address test anxiety in nursing students. These ranged from the clichéd (playing classical music during the examination or diffusing essential lemon oil in the classroom) to the technical (embracing “biofeedback relaxation techniques” such as progressive muscle relaxation training and “diaphragmatic breathing exercises”) to the downright wacky (researchers providing students with a “magic pencil” - described to them as having magical properties to support success).

All of these strategies have a degree of research support, though, in many cases, there are methodological issues and a lack of convincing replication evidence. Many of them are also simply not suitable for school environments.

Fortunately, however, some other strategies seem more promisingly placed to benefit our most anxious students - and perhaps everyone else in the class, as well.

“Addressing the effects of test anxiety is not only a wellbeing aim but also an issue of social equality”

Before looking at these strategies, it should be stated that students who suffer from severe anxiety require, and should receive, specialist help.

Classroom strategies will always be secondary to any clinical assistance that is being offered, and should not interfere with this in any way.

Of course, getting students the external support they need is often easier said than done, as the no man’s land between those who need help and those who can actually be accommodated by our creaking child and adolescent mental health services (Camhas) system grows ever larger each day.

Teachers are not, and should not aspire to be, making “quasi-clinical judgements”, as former Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman put it.

For those students who do struggle, though, there are some relatively simple evidence-backed interventions that we can try.

Short-term strategies: expressive writing and emotional reappraisal

The first is “expressive writing”. This involves asking a student to write “as openly as possible about their thoughts and feelings” concerning the task they are about to perform.

For a 2011 paper, US researchers Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock asked students to do this for 10 minutes before sitting an exam, and found that it significantly improved performance, compared with a control group.

Indeed, it removed the correlation between test anxiety and performance altogether, as highly test-anxious students improved to the same level as low-anxiety students. Having initially found these results in controlled laboratory settings, Ramirez and Beilock went on to successfully replicate their study in schools.

While the exact mechanism by which expressive writing reduces the effects of anxiety is not entirely clear, it is thought that the benefit to the students comes less from the reduction of anxiety itself and more through reducing the cognitive overload associated with it.

The process of explicitly recording anxieties surrounding the assessment is thought to reduce intrusive thoughts during the test itself, thereby improving performance.

A second method that more directly targets the anxiety of the students is “emotional reappraisal”. In 2019, Christopher Rozek and colleagues asked US students to read a short passage designed to help them reappraise the physiological arousal associated with anxiety.

The passage described how the same physical reactions that we might have in response to stress (faster heartbeat, sweaty palms, shortness of breath, butterflies in the stomach, and so on) also occur in pleasant situations, such as when we are excited about a surprise or when we are getting ready for a fun sports competition.

The information given to participants emphasised how these physical reactions can be desirable, helping us to stay alert and pay attention.

Educating students about this can help them to see the anxiety they might feel about an assessment as something normal and transient. In fact, in Rozek’s study, emotional reappraisal reduced the test anxiety gap by 81 per cent, and removed the effect of socio-economic status on anxiety.

It’s important to note that the effects of both of these interventions will likely be short-lived, so they do not represent a “cure” for test anxiety. However, both studies show that simple strategies, which take no longer than 10 minutes, can be effective in temporarily reducing test anxiety in real classroom settings, leading to improved academic performance.

Longer-term strategies: cognitive reappraisal

As promising as expressive writing and emotional reappraisal are, they represent sticking plasters rather than lasting treatment. A longer-term solution, if teachers have the time and resources, might be to try to restructure the thought processes that cause test anxiety in the first place.

Cognitive reappraisal techniques involve analysing and reassessing thought processes in a similar way to the emotional reappraisal technique above, but they target more deeply rooted thinking structures and are designed to be used over a number of weeks.

For example, the inquiry-based stress reduction (IBSR) method asks participants to explore and then challenge the thoughts that create anxiety.

This process might start by examining the causes and consequences of the thoughts, and weighing up their benefits and costs.

Challenging them may be done by imagining what life would be like without the anxious thoughts, and then actively seeking information that contradicts the stressful thought processes. In the case of test anxiety, if the anxiety is arising from beliefs like “I am not clever enough to pass this exam”, students would be encouraged to collect evidence to the contrary.

In a 2019 study, German researcher Ann Krispenz and colleagues put this to the test, and found that IBSR reduced test anxiety, increased self-efficacy and reduced procrastination in a group of 40 test-anxious students. However, subsequent effects on academic performance were not measured.

Many of the techniques in cognitive reappraisal are adapted from the more formal therapy system of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

In one interesting school-based example from 2020, Christian Ugwuanyi and colleagues used a music-based CBT programme (which alternated between music therapy sessions and CBT group therapy) to combat test anxiety in science, in primary school students in Nigeria.

Compared with a control group that just received conventional counselling for anxiety, the music-based CBT group had significantly reduced test anxiety after the therapy, and also at a follow-up three months later.

Whole-school test anxiety reduction: feedback literacy

So far, the ideas we’ve looked at have focused on techniques for individuals who show high levels of test anxiety. But what can we do at a whole-school level to improve things, not only for the most anxious but for all?

One area for schools to focus on might be developing students’ “feedback literacy”. This is defined by researchers David Carless and David Boud as “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies”.

It might seem obvious that students would need to be able to make sense of feedback, and, indeed, you might take it as a given that they already can. But think for a moment about whether your students really know why we assess them and provide feedback.

Think about whether they embrace that feedback and welcome the chance for opportunities to improve, or whether they would be more comfortable sheltering behind a simple grade.

Think about how many of your students (or, dare I say it, your colleagues) see school assessments as primarily about measuring, or ranking, rather than learning.

If the answer is “most of them”, that’s hardly surprising. In the absence of being specifically taught about the purpose and value of feedback, students are going to struggle to grasp its worth.

“Encouraging a ‘culture of error’ across a school community may go a long way towards reducing test anxiety”

Unfortunately, this limited view of feedback is extremely difficult to shift, even with explicit teaching. But it can be done, and it can make a difference.

Carless and Boud divide feedback literacy into four key attributes: appreciating feedback, making judgements, managing effect and taking action. However, I think that a great deal of students’ general test anxiety can be reduced by helping them to understand one simple, overarching principle: that mistakes are a crucial part of learning.

Most students naturally equate mistakes with failure, and so see tests and assessments in a fearful light: they are things designed to produce mistakes. But mistakes, and forgetting, actually play a crucial role in the learning process.

As Tomás Ryan and Paul Frankland have pointed out, as we forget surface details, we gain “gist”, seeing deeper underlying meanings and connections between different memories.

And as researcher Nate Kornell has shown, what he calls “retrieval failure with corrective feedback” (forgetting, but with the correct answer subsequently provided) can be as effective for future learning as initial retrieval success.

In fact, even deliberate mistakes seem to lead to learning benefits later down the line, as a 2021 study by Sarah Wong and Stephen Lim indicated.

Of course, we aren’t going to start encouraging students to make deliberate mistakes any time soon (this would be a perfect example of a “lethal mutation” - oversimplified research interpretations backfiring in the classroom), but this finding can be used with students to at least illustrate that there is no necessary connection between present errors and poor future performance.

Encouraging what education researcher Doug Lemov has called a “culture of error” - in which mistakes are embraced as a key feature of learning, and the response to an error is emphasised as being more important than an error itself - across a school community may go a long way towards reducing the general level of test anxiety for students at all starting points.

It may also help to depersonalise the experience of receiving corrective feedback; if there is no threat of “rejection”, then students’ differing levels of rejection sensitivity will not be as problematic.

Evaluating educational evidence and applying it to classrooms is usually a fraught and precarious business. Test anxiety is notable as one area where this seems not so much to be the case.

The evidence suggests a number of relatively easy and quite impactful strategies, with different interventions available for individual and whole-school approaches, different levels of severity, different budgets and different levels of access to specialist assistance.

Ultimately, then, managing test anxiety is one aspect of teaching and learning that we can perhaps afford to feel a little less anxious about.

Michael Hobbiss is a psychology teacher and cognitive neuroscience researcher

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