Some students get so nervous before a test, they do poorly even if they know the material. Sian Beilock, a professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has studied these highly anxious test-takers. The students start worrying about the results. And when we worry ,
it actually uses up attention and memory resources (资源).
Professor Beilock and another researcher, Gerardo Ramirez, have developed a possible solution. Just before an exam, highly anxious test-takers spend ten minutes writing about their worries about the test.
The researchers tested the idea on a group of twenty anxious college students. They gave them two short math tests. After the first one, they asked the students to either sit quietly or write about their feelings about the upcoming second test.
Professor Beilock says those who sat quietly scored an average of twelve percent worse on the second test. But the students who had written about their fears improved their performance by an average of five percent. Next, the researchers used younger students in a biology class. They told them before final exams either to write about their feelings or to think about things unrelated to the test. Prefessor Beilock says highly anxious students who did the writing got an average grade of B+, compared to a B- for those who did not.
"What we showed is that for students who are highly test-anxious, who'd done our writing intervention (干预), all of a sudden there was no relationship between test anxiety and performance. They were performing just as well as their classmates who don't normally get nervous in these testing situations."
But what if students do not have a chance to write about their fears immediately before an exam. Professor Beilock says students can try it themselves at home or in the library and still improve their performance.
