Exams are nerve-racking, especially for those already of an anxious disposition. The silence of the hall; the ticking of the clock; the beady eye of the invigilator; the smug expression of the person sitting at the neighboring desk who has finished 15 minutes early. It therefore seems hardly surprising that those who worry about taking tests do systematically worse than those who do not.
What is, perhaps surprising, according to the research published recently in Psychological Science by Maria Theobad at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and her colleagues, is that it is not the pressure of the exam hall which causes the problem. It is the pressure of revision.
What Dr Theobald found was that anxiety on the day of the test did not predict exam performance at all. What did predict it was the level of knowledge a student displayed in the mock exam and the earlier digital learning activities. Those who performed well in these also did well in the real thing, regardless of how anxious they were on the day.
What actually hampered students, it turned out, were high levels of anxiety during the weeks before the exam took place. The greater a student’s anxiety in the days before the exam the lower his or her knowledge gain was during that period, leaving that student with less helpful material in mind during the exam itself.
And this is a positive discovery, for it suggests a change of approach to revision by the anxious might help improve their results.
Dr Theobald notes that test-anxiety is at its worst when students have low expectations of success and simultaneously know that passing the exam is exceedingly important. To reduce this anxiety, she proposes a two fold strategy for students to consider as they revise.
First they can raise their belief in their own abilities by reminding themselves of just how much they know. Second, they can weaken the significance of the test by reminding themselves that, while it is important, it is not a life or death situation.
【小题1】According to the research, which of the following can help to predict a student’s bad results in exams?| A．The exam hall is silent during the exams. |
| B．He is very much afraid of the exams. |
| C．He feels great pressure from his classmates. |
| D．He displayed low-level knowledge gain in his revision. |
| A．The level of his anxiety on the exam day. |
| B．His scale of knowledge shown in the mock exam. |
| C．His digital learning abilities during the exam. |
| D．His good performance in the real exam. |
| A．helped. | B．encouraged. |
| C．stimulated. | D．blocked. |
| A．Have more confidence in their abilities. |
| B．Value the importance of passing the exam. |
| C．Have low expectations of success. |
| D．Deny the significance of the text. |
