Exam anxiety: using the telescope as well as the microscope

'Strategies for tackling exam pressure and stress (STEPS)' was listed recently among the BPS Learn courses and events. The prospectus explains:

"Suited for colleagues who are secondary school teachers, this six-session eLearning intervention is designed to prepare participants to deliver a structured programme (STEPS), and is proven to support students who may have issues with exam anxiety."

STEPS develops the work of Professor David Putwain (his work featured across the BPS website). It is a positive development – in a context where exam anxiety often makes the difference between academic success and failure. Indeed, the mere anticipation of tests and exams – with all the associated anxieties – prevents some people from ever embarking on learning at all.

So tackling exam anxiety is undoubtedly a 'good thing'. But is a STEPS-type analysis, which tackles exam anxiety as a 'within-individuals' phenomenon, the only way to reduce exam anxiety? Should we not also tackle that other anxiety-causing problem – poor exam design – and thereby reduce the external causes of exam stress and anxiety? Then there would be much less need to 'firefight' exam anxiety in unlucky, badly-affected individuals.

When I used to teach psychology, three sources of exam fear/anxiety were experienced almost universally – and all reflected aspects of exam design:

1) The exam will leave out the areas in which I am most knowledgeable.

2) The questions on my strongest area/s will be phrased obliquely or ambiguously, so that I misunderstand the question. 

3) I will run out of time before I complete the answers. Or be so stressed by the need to express myself quickly that I panic and write rubbish.

Recent externally-set past papers (a sample from A-level psychology) suggest that these overlapping problems still exist. Tight time limits are still in place, disadvantaging students who only perform at their best when they have time to mull things over thoroughly. Students can still open an exam paper and find that their best areas of competence are completely untested. And exams still include questions that could easily be misinterpreted, permitting a student to make a 'correct' answer to the wrong question.

This means that the main (and surely uncontentious?) objective of an exam – to provide a platform for every student to showcase the things they have learned – is still vulnerable to chance and remains a test of high-speed performance. It is a circumstance likely to create anxiety in all of us – and not merely single out 'anxious people'.

So, what psychological understanding can be employed here? And how can it be applied to reduce anxiety for students at every level of competence?

One way to understand the performance deficit caused by exam anxiety is to apply the apposite (albeit ancient) Yerkes-Dodson Law – and then combine it with cognitive/learning theories to produce practical solutions. The YDL describes the relationship between performance level and arousal level, giving it as an inverted U. So, if the optimal level of arousal for performance is 'medium', the task for exam designers is straightforward. Within the limits of practicality, exam design should aim to provide a stimulating challenge – but not a terrifying ordeal. The mission statement of every exam designer should be "to provide a stimulating and encouraging environment that permits every student to show off what they know." But in order to actually do this, examiners must resolve those three problems (and perhaps others) that prevent it from happening in practice.

Making formal exams more student-friendly has other spin-off benefits. Especially, it would help teachers to create a more positive attitude towards exams in schools. If students learn from the outset that informal and formal exams will definitely give them an opportunity to use their skills, that would motivate learning – creating, in turn, more exam confidence. Instead, young people learn that exams can punish perfectly competent students who need time to reflect, and students who happen to have focused on learning the 'wrong' thing. Students learn that exam success is, in part, a lottery – no matter how hard they work.

So how can exams be redesigned to reduce anxiety?

Happily, basic improvements are not hugely difficult – if only because we are starting from such a low base. Here are a few suggestions…

Allowing more choice of questions to reduce 'lucky-dip anxiety' seems perfectly viable. There could even be flexibility about how many questions a student answers. Students might, for example, choose to answer a greater number of questions but answer them more thinly – allowing students to display breadth of subject knowledge, and not only depth.

Eliminating ambiguous phrases, which cause students to fret about whether or not they will correctly understand the questions, should be a non-negotiable requirement of exam design. If achieving that kind of clarity means that an exam question reads more like a paragraph than a sentence, no problem. Clarity is paramount.

And an exam should allow students as much time as they need, within sensible reason, to express themselves. Why should reflective students be penalised? How many real-world situations demand immediate written answers to unknown questions, without an opportunity to take advice?

Exams are here to stay. As long as human life is competitive, as well as cooperative, there will be a need for objective tests of comparative achievement. The STEPS programme is a valuable means to reduce exam anxiety for particular, affected individuals.

But it is only one half of the equation. We must also reduce the number of affected individuals by reducing 'extraneous' structural problems that cause exam anxiety.

-        Dr Chris Timms is an independent writer. [email protected]