Relieving test anxiety by writing down worries

A new study suggests that students who write down their anxieties a few minutes before taking an exam are much less likely to choke on the test. University of Chicago psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock ran one study for two years at a high school. Students who spent ten minutes writing about feelings and worries about the test scored six percent higher than those who wrote about non-"expressive" topics. This reminds me of "exposure therapy" for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, and phobias in which safe exposure to the feared object or situation gradually desensitizes you to it. The researchers published their results in the current issue of the journal Science. From the Science podcast:

Beilock: There’s work in clinical psychology showing that getting clinically depressed individuals to journal or write about emotional or traumatic experiences in their lives can help decrease rumination. And we have a lot of work in our lab showing that students worry in testing situations, and this is something that can really derail their ability to attend to and remember information they need for the test. So, we hypothesized that perhaps having students write about their thoughts and feelings about an upcoming test before they took the exam might, in a sense, allow them to deal with some of these worries, such that when they were in the actual exam situation they were less likely to pop up.

Science Magazine podcast January 14, 2011 (MP3)

"Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom" (Science)

• [chuck]

  looks interesting! can we get a linkfix?

• [kmoser]

  I wonder how well the placebo effect works here, i.e. does it help if you write nothing but “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy”?

  • [knappa]

    I guess some are hitting a paywall or something. The study addressed that question. Writing on unrelated subjects didn’t help.

• [Anonymous]

  Cool study. Thanks for posting. I wonder if 10 minutes of mindfulness or breath awareness would do the same thing? Certain meditation practices can lower blood pressure, decrease thought and allow increased clarity of thought.

• [grandmapucker]

  This sounds like something in The Artist’s Way. She encourages you to write 3 pages every morning of whatever is on your mind, and not to worry if it’s stuff about bills or whatever. Her thinking is that this stuff that you’re focusing on is sort of clogging your mind, and if you get it out, you’re free to let your brain think about the more important stuff.

• [pwandz]

  Doesn’t this just show that kids that HAVE feelings/anxieties score better?

  If someone is writing about a “non-expressive” subject, like last night’s episode of The Simpsons, they’re not worried about doing as well? And are probably used to not doing well?

  I think there are flaws in the interpretation of the data here, and even the collection of the data

  I don’t know!

• [Anonymous]

  Interesting! I can’t access the original scientific article (paywall) but I’m curious what kind of test they gave the students.

  I’ve read up a lot about stereotype threat in STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields, and there is research that something as simple as having to fill in a “race” or “gender” bubble before starting a STEM-related test can cause members of the stereotypically “not-as-skilled” race or gender to do much more poorly on said test.

  Could writing down worries about doing poorly on say a Physics test because one is female, actually cause a student to do more poorly on the test? Or will the act of writing down the anxiety help the student realize that they are in a stereotype threat situation, and that their worries about doing poorly on a test because of gender or race are unfounded, and help them do better on the test? This article suggests the latter would be true, and perhaps it is! I find this very interesting :D

  • [knappa]

    From the article:

    We began by creating a high-stakes testing environment in the laboratory. In study 1, college students (N = 20) took two short tests composed of Gauss’s modular arithmetic. Modular arithmetic is advantageous as a laboratory task because, although it is based on common mathematical procedures, most students have not seen it before; thus, previous task experience is controlled.

    I’ll feel a bit silly doing it, but I think that I might tell my students to come 10min early for their next exam.

• [David Pescovitz]

  Fixed, thanks!

• [ben]

  Writing about your feelings for 10minutes! What kind of namby pamby students are these.

• [apoxia]

  My bf is a clinical psychologist at a sleep centre and says writing down your thoughts before bed can also help people with getting to sleep. That is of course if the reason you find it hard to get to sleep is thoughts zipping relentlessly through your head.