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)