Test anxiety is not just about how the child feels in the room taking the test, said Nathaniel von der Embse, an assistant professor of school psychology at the University of South Florida, who was the first author on a 30-year review of test anxiety published in 2018.
The review showed that test anxiety is correlated with negative educational outcomes, and that the effects were strongest in the middle grades. This correlation does not show cause and effect; children may do badly because they’re anxious, or may be anxious because they do badly. But one major worry is that it goes both ways, setting up a kind of cycle of anxiety and poor performance.
There are three phases of test anxiety, Dr. von der Embse said, and the first is before exam day. “Test anxiety is really a cognitive emotional and physical reaction to evaluation and the consequences of evaluation,” he said, and parents and teachers can use the time leading up to the test to help children, especially younger children, understand what the test is for, and how the results will be used.
Sometimes parents contribute to the pressures children feel by emphasizing the date, said Jane Pernotto Ehrman, a mind-body coach and behavioral health therapist, who has written guidelines for parents on coping with test anxiety. “The pressures for students around test anxiety are both internal and external,” she said. “It starts externally with parents saying you’ve got to eat well, go to bed early, you’ve got a big test tomorrow.”
Instead, she said that parents should emphasize the everyday importance of regular bedtimes, good nutrition and healthy breakfasts so the brain can function well and encourage children to do their best with whatever the events of a given day may be. “Treat testing in a positive way,” she said, telling children: “You have a way to show all the things you learned in that subject.”
The second phase is the actual test, during which children may experience behavioral and physical responses. Ms. Ehrman suggested that breathing techniques can be “one of the most powerful, effective, convenient, inexpensive” ways of relieving stress. “Notice where you feel it in your body, and imagine you’re gathering that up when you inhale, and then part your lips and blow it away,” she said. “You have to breathe anyway; you might as well do it deeply.”
Students can also rehearse how they want to go through the exam, recalling the information quickly and accurately, she said, “because everything you’ve learned is there on the shelf of your memory.”
The third phase is what happens after the exam, which Dr. von der Embse said is often overlooked. But it can be a time to talk about the test results and what they are used for. “They’re just a snapshot, ideally used to inform,” he said.
“We, as a culture, often think of tests as something you should be anxious about,” said Shannon Brady, an assistant professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, who has studied test anxiety in first-year college students. “We also believe that anxiety is likely to hurt you.” Excessive worrying — or even ruminating — is negatively associated with performance, but the heightened physiological response to stress may actually help a child focus and face the test in a positive productive way.
“Help people understand, your anxiety is your body trying to help you,” she said. The goal, she said, is managing stress, and not simply reducing it, and for both children and adults rethinking stress can be very helpful. If parents can help their children manage stress in all kinds of situations, she said, “they can think about something like an exam or public speaking as a challenge, not a threat, and help the kid worry less.”
Of course, children who are suffering extreme anxiety over this or anything else may need other kinds of help.
[Read more about helping students embrace stress. Watch a TED Talk on making stress your friend.]
Test-taking anxiety is one of the most disruptive emotions for learning, said Daniela Raccanello, a developmental and educational psychologist in the department of human sciences at the University of Verona, Italy. The problem is not limited to any one country or educational system; she and her colleagues published research last year, looking at children in Italy, Germany and the United States.
Programs in schools that increase students’ understanding of emotions can be very valuable, she said, and can help promote positive emotions and decrease negative ones. Through one such project, she said, Italian students learn to understand their emotions; though the project focuses on traumatic events such as earthquakes, it offers children coping strategies that may help in other stressful situations.
Dr. von der Embse said that parents and teachers and school psychologists can coach children, helping them recognize the signs and symptoms of anxiety, from fidgeting to talking fast to sweating — and then teach them strategies to deal with those feelings.
“It’s important for us as a culture to stop framing tests as inherently negative,” Dr. Brady said. Parents need to help their children get away from what she called “contingent self-esteem,” the sense that they won’t be loved or valued if they don’t do well.
We tend to celebrate children for good grades and test scores, but it’s important to reinforce that “you are valued for a number of things and even if you have a bad day in one of those domains, you are still a person of worth,” Dr. Brady said.
Dr. von der Embse said that he had seen a resurgence of interest in the question of anxiety around high-stakes testing over the past 12 years, particularly around the No Child Left Behind legislation. “We really can’t talk about test anxiety without talking about environment and particularly teacher stress,” Dr. von der Embse said. Many schools use student test scores to evaluate teachers, he said, and this can create a high stress environment in which the teachers’ stress is communicated to the students. “You might be able to equip your child with individual strategies for handling stress, but if the school is not coordinating their messaging around testing and supporting their teachers, it’s going to be a stressful environment.”
He pointed to the recent college admissions scandals as evidence of the level of intensity that some parents bring to the question of their children’s test scores. “For parents, this is an opportunity for their own self-reflection — are you placing undue stress on your child, are you telling your second-grade student, if you don’t do well, you won’t get into an Ivy League school?”
But Dr. von der Embse does not believe in parents opting out of the tests. “We face evaluative situations throughout our entire lives, it’s best to learn how to handle them,” he said.