Clammy palms. Racing heart. Trembling fingers. Mind going blank. Clock-watching. Second-guessing answers. Reading and re-reading questions or passages without absorbing the meaning. These are some symptoms that students with anxiety may experience during tests. These symptoms affect approximately 15-22% of youth in our classrooms. For some of them, this anxiety is an uncomfortable nuisance, but for others, it can be debilitating and cause them to grossly underperform relative to their capabilities. Today, we’ll discuss how teachers, parents, and even peers can support students struggling to keep anxiety in check during high-pressure academic performance situations.
Preparation
Planning and preparing—in healthy doses—can do much to manage this kind of anxiety. For students prone to anxiety, being objectively un- or under-prepared is typically a recipe for problems. If they have anxious thoughts about the test, there may be some truth to them. If a student doesn’t study enough, they may indeed perform poorly, thus reinforcing their fears. As such, leaving plenty of time for studying, practicing, learning test-taking strategies, and asking the teacher questions can help build both skills and confidence before test day. Something simple like knowing the format of the test (e.g., the approximate length, computer vs. paper, multiple choice vs. essay) ahead of time can also help students plan and have fewer surprises on the day.
Preparation, as an anxiety management strategy, can be tricky, however, because avoidance and procrastination are also hallmarks of academic anxiety. Though perhaps counterintuitive, approaching stressful situations vs. avoiding them helps individuals best cope with stress. In other words, you can support anxious students by encouraging them to engage with and get more information about a stressor (versus shying away from it), which will help them seek solutions and build comfort.
Mindset
Much of academic confidence is a mind game, and those around a student can help them win it. If you notice a student showing signs of intense nervousness before a test, one of the first and most powerful things you can do is to normalize it. Yes, it’s normal to be somewhat nervous before a test, and the last thing we want is for a student to feel anxious about feeling anxious, which is an added cognitive burden. In fact, learning how to harness the energy of anxiety can benefit students. Anxiety is a double-edged sword – there is “bad anxiety” and “good anxiety.” In the field of psychology, the Yerkses-Dodson Law indicates that there is an optimal level of anxiety for best performance, and it isn’t zero. If someone stresses too much, yes, this can cause panic and shutdown and negatively affect performance. However, if someone doesn’t stress at all (e.g., not studying, rushing through a test), they also will not do well. Thus, anxiety, in appropriate doses, is a motivator. It means a student cares, which helps them succeed.
However, if the nervousness has gone too far, working on adjusting mindset can be helpful to get anxiety back in the optimal zone. A student can practice thought reframing, or replacing anxious thoughts with more helpful and realistic ones. A student might be thinking, “No matter how much I study, I feel like I’m going to fail!” A reframed thought might be “I usually study hard and do well on tests, so that’s likely to happen this time even if I’m nervous.”
Another technique to use might be visualization, or mentally walking through, in detail, what strategies, steps, and feelings would be involved in successful test-taking (e.g., studying calmly, feeling prepared, having needed materials on the day, feeling confident in answers, finishing on time, seeing a good grade). Anxiety creates a lot of focus on negative scenarios and essentially mentally rehearsing doing poorly. Conversely, spending more mental energy imagining doing well deepens the mental habits and brain pathways to better prepare students for positive outcomes.
A final technique might be to help the student gain perspective. Students in anxiety-mode tend to catastrophize or imagine the worst-case scenario (e.g., “I didn’t get a chance to look at my notes again, so I’m going to fail the test and probably the class, and my parents will ground me, and I’ll lose all my friends.”). Decatastrophizing can allow us to acknowledge, that even if bad things happen, it’s usually not the end of the world. What happens if this student does fail for some reason? They could do fine on all the other tests and still pass, and parents and friends likely would support and not abandon the student during this time. That line of thinking helps take some of the pressure off. Anxiety is not just worrying that bad things will happen; it’s the fear that we won’t be able to handle them if they do. Express confidence that your student is resourceful and can handle challenges, should they arise.
Rituals & Routines
The things students do leading up to a test matter tremendously for mindset, and there are a variety of steps that can help keep anxiety at bay. Keeping a balanced schedule on the regular is important for them to be in a good headspace to perform on tests. Being over-extended with extracurriculars, incessant homework/study marathons, or work schedules for teens can leave students stressed and burned out by test days.
Self-care is an antidote. As a test gets closer, encourage the student to have a cut-off time for time for studying. Some portion of successful testing is preparation, but another portion is performance and critical thinking on the day. As such, the student will need to get quality sleep the night before, eat something sustaining before a test, and take any needed medications. Caffeine and running late can both exacerbate anxiety and should be avoided by the student. Nerves may naturally start creeping up on test day, but arriving early will allow a student time to induce relaxation (e.g., deep breathing, muscle relaxation, further visualization) before and during the exam, as needed. Finally, what happens after the test, but before the grade is important, too. Anxiety can result in a relentless inner critic and feelings of never being good enough (e.g., an A- devastating a high performer). Making sure a child or teenager takes time to acknowledge and celebrate their effort after facing testing fears helps bring positive coping full circle.
Professional Help
Again, for some students, anxiety around academic pressures can be extreme, and the above types of support and self-help may only get them so far. In these cases, it may be time to assemble a professional team to help the student find some relief:
Assessment – A formal psychoeducational assessment may help make sure no undiagnosed ADHD, learning disabilities, or other cognitive processing issues are genuinely making learning more challenging and anxiety-provoking for the student.
Therapy – If a student experiences impairment due to testing anxiety, a student’s family may want to work with a therapist to develop a treatment plan to help reduce symptoms.
Special Education/Accommodations – For students whose anxiety rises to the level of a disability, the student might qualify for special education interventions or accommodations (e.g., extended testing time, distraction-reduced environment) to help them best learn and show what they know. (See our blog post on seeking services in the schools for more info).
Further Resources
Mayo Clinic – Test Anxiety: Can It Be Treated?: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/generalized-anxiety-disorder/expert-answers/test-anxiety/faq-20058195
US News & World Report – How to Support a Child with Test Anxiety: https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/how-to-support-a-child-with-test-anxiety
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About the Author
Taylor Thompson, Ph.D., serves as a distance learning developer and literature coder on the Services and Products Development team at PracticeWise. Learn more about Dr. Thompson on the PracticeWise team page.
