Bitesize Research: Supporting Students With Exam Anxiety

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week! With exams well underway for IB and coming up for GCSE, and following a bitesize post I wrote last year on exam anxiety and it’s relationship to exam performance, I was interested to see an article in TES about how to support students with exam anxiety.

Objectives: To understand how to support students with exam anxiety

Summary: 

• The article states that it may be that a quarter of students suffer from exam anxiety - defined as an ‘anxiety condition focused on evaluative situations’.

• They suggest some of the following research-informed strategies to support students who may be dealing with this:

• Expressive writing - asking students to write about their thoughts and feelings openly as possible about the task they are about to undertake. 

• Emotional reappraisal - explaining to students that the physical feelings they are experiencing e.g. faster heartbeat also occur in pleasant situations. This can support students to understand that for some, therefore, anxiety is transient and normal. They are also keen to stress, though, that for some students, more severe anxiety requires clinical support.

• Cognitive reappraisal techniques - this requires a longer-term reexamination of the causes, thoughts and feelings that are associated with exam anxiety, then challenging them to seek information that contradicts their negative thoughts.

• They also argue that at a whole school level, improving ‘feedback literacy’ can support to alleviate test anxiety. This involves getting students to really deeply understand what we are assessing, and the purpose of assessing and getting feedback on it.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• How am I currently noticing students’ exam anxiety manifest?

• How am I currently supporting students with exam anxiety?

• What support do I need to improve my practice with working with students with exam anxiety?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!