Five Tips for Teachers of Students Dealing with Testing Anxiety
Test·ing Anx·i·ety: a form of performance anxiety that is characterized by fear, worry, tension, and even feelings of physical illness in the face of taking an exam.
Ep·i·sode: a finite period in which someone is affected by a specified illness.
Tenth-grade math did it for me. My school combined Algebra II and Geometry into one semester of instruction for students on the gifted track, so we had twice as much content to study over the course of eighteen weeks. There was a test or a quiz at least once a week, and I began to struggle with math for the first time.
I began having episodes, although I did not yet know what that meant. My symptoms included a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath. I did not know what they were or why they occurred, so my anxiety remained unchecked and slowly began to worsen. In the coming years my palms began to sweat, I felt a lump in my throat, my head began to hurt, and I had trouble breathing and calming myself down before and during tests.
According to the American Test Anxieties Association, 34-38% of students have some degree of testing anxiety. 16-20% of these students have a more severe form of the disability.
The journey to overcoming testing anxiety can be a long and difficult one, but I believe that the attitude and mentality of the teachers involved can go a long way towards helping anxious students feel more comfortable in a testing environment.
Here are my top five tips for teachers of students who struggle with testing anxiety.
Remember that people react to similar situations in very different ways.
Do not dismiss this as obvious. One of the biggest mistakes a teacher can make is assuming that one student shouldn’t struggle with taking a test because other students in the class didn’t struggle with that same test. But humans process information and ideas in their own unique ways. This remains true when testing.
Don’t treat your student’s testing anxiety as an inconvenience to you.
Students with testing anxiety can often feel ashamed or humiliated about their condition and the accommodations they may need. It’s important that teachers’ actions do not reinforce this negative line of thinking. Never treat your student’s difficulties as a personal inconvenience to you, even if helping to ameliorate them may require extra time and consideration on your end.
Teach effective study habits and test-taking practices.
Test-taking is a skill that can be cultivated and refined. Oftentimes, the more prepared a student feels, the less likely they are to be anxious on test-day.
Encourage your students to study in advance, especially for end-of-course assessments and assessments that cover a lot of content. Create study plans for the class that encourage preparation ahead of time.
Discourage catastrophizing. Remind your student that one test is not the end of the world. Remind them that’s okay to have a few bad grades. Remind them that it’s okay to fall down as long as they get back up again.
Teach strategies for the test itself: read questions in full before attempting to answer them; skip and come back to the difficult ones; check work if time permits
Provide resources for strategies such as deep breathing, guided meditation, muscle relaxation and positive self-talks. Such strategies can help students to calm down before an assessment. Allow students a couple of minutes to calm down prior to the assessment.
Encourage your student to look into counseling or disability services.
Access to counseling resources can make a huge impact on anyone struggling with a disability. Inform your students of the resources offered by your school, such as counseling or testing accommodations. Also be sure to bring up outside counseling as a potential option.
Outside counseling is especially helpful as it allows students to understand the root causes of their anxiety. Counseling can help students feel empowered to overcome their anxiety.
Remember that the long-term goal is to overcome the anxiety.
While it’s important to treat students with sensitivity, it’s also important to allow them the room to overcome their anxieties. If a student with testing anxiety is preparing for a final exam or an AP exam, offer to put them in a mock testing environment to help soothe their nerves for the real thing. Instead of shielding students from their fears, the job of an educator is to provide them with consistent exposure to those fears so that they may have the opportunity to overcome them. Such treatment will be infinitely more valuable in the long-term.
Read more about testing anxiety: https://247learningacademy.com/blog/2019/5/23/reducing-test-anxiety-with-the-three-principles
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