Coping with Test Anxiety

From the time they enter kinder garten until they complete high school, students are subjected to an increasing number of tests and eval uations. Although most students face these situations with normal amounts of nervousness, some students do not cope well in testing situations and expe rience moderate to severe anxiety, which has a detrimental effect on their test performances and, subsequently, their advancement. In teaching devel opmental reading to college freshmen, we have seen many bright, able stu dents who do poorly on tests and at tribute their performance to their ex treme nervousness coming into the test or their inability to ' 'think* ' or concen trate during the test. Frustrated by seeing these hardwork ing students perform poorly on tests, we examined the research on test anxie ty to see if we could discover ways to help them. We will present here a brief summary of the typical causes of test anxiety and discuss three ways that teachers can help their test-anxious, or even simply test-nervous, students: by teaching effective learning strate gies, using cooperative learning, and providing a positive classroom atmos phere.