Fear of Taking Tests

The sentence that matters most in this literature is about causation. Inferior performance arises not because of intellectual problems or poor academic preparation, but because the testing situation creates a sense of threat, and the anxiety that follows disrupts attention and memory.

That is a measurable penalty applied to knowledge the student already has.

Where the attention goes

George Mandler and Seymour Sarason set out the mechanism in 1952 and it has held. The difference in performance between a high-anxious and a low-anxious candidate comes down to what each can attend to. The low-anxious one puts attention on the task. The high-anxious one divides it between the task and their own internal state, and cannot bring the whole of it to the paper.

Blanking has the same explanation. The sensation of forgetting, or of drawing a blank, is produced by interference between the responses the question calls for and the irrelevant responses the anxious state is generating.

Seymour Sarason's brother, Irwin G. Sarason, contributed the work separating this from other focused anxieties and from generalised anxiety.

Which components the split names

Liebert and Morris analysed test anxiety into two distinct factors, and the split is still used.

Emotionality is the physiological half: raised galvanic skin response and heart rate, dizziness, nausea, feelings of panic. Cognitive test anxiety is the other half, the worry itself.

The somatic list is long and specific:

• headache and stomach ache
• diarrhoea and nausea
• excessive sweating and dry mouth
• shortness of breath and rapid heartbeat
• lightheadedness or fainting, and in some cases a full panic attack The cognitive and behavioural signs are poor concentration, going blank or freezing, confusion, poor organisation, and fidgeting or avoiding the test altogether.

Why it is a state not a trait

The distinction from generalised anxiety disorder is clean. Generalised anxiety disorder is characterised by trait anxiety, producing high stress across a wide range of situations. Test anxiety is state anxiety, with the nervousness specific to being tested. It is also one of the three causes named for foreign language anxiety.

Under DSM-IV it could be diagnosed under social phobia, which requires four things: an immediate anxiety response on exposure to the feared situation, attempts to avoid it or endure it with extreme fear, disruption to normal activities, and symptoms lasting at least six months.

What the teacher pressure experiment showed

Putwain and Best ran the experiment in 2011 that most teachers would rather not see. They examined test performance in primary school children while the teacher applied pressure to create a higher-stress environment.

The children performed worse under high threat, and experienced more test anxiety and more worrisome thoughts, than the same children in a low-threat environment.

Parental pressure produces the same pattern: more worry, more test-irrelevant thought, and stronger bodily symptoms during a test.

Together those two findings locate a measurable part of the problem in the adults setting the conditions.

Which features of the test matter

The environment contributes independently of the student. The nature of the task, its difficulty, the atmosphere, time constraints, the examiner's characteristics, the mode of administration and the physical setting all affect how anxious a candidate becomes.

How the cycle closes

Test anxiety is described as developing into a vicious cycle with a clear shape. Having experienced it once, a student becomes frightened of it recurring, and arrives at the next test more anxious than before, and sometimes more anxious than they were during the test that started it.

Left unacknowledged, and without help sought, the student may reach helplessness. That is the point at which the condition stops being about tests.

Who it lands on

Two groups are named together and the pairing is worth noticing: students with disabilities and students in gifted education classes both tend to experience high rates.

Test anxiety runs in families, with parents or siblings frequently having it or another anxiety, and anxiety does appear to have genetic components.

The other associated variables are a list of things this catalogue meets repeatedly: obsessive-compulsive disorders, perfectionist tendencies and unrealistic expectations, negative self-esteem and self-criticism, poor motivation or confidence, stereotype threat, inadequate study and test-taking skills, and poor eating, sleeping and exercise habits.

What it costs beyond the mark

The consequences reported reach past the paper. High emotional distress correlates directly with reduced academic performance and higher overall student drop-out rates, and test anxiety affects social, emotional and behavioural development along with how a student feels about themselves and about school.

Some anxiety is normal and often helpful for staying alert. The 2008 printed encyclopedia of phobias handles the term in four words and sends the reader to test anxiety, which is the right destination.