'Take exam anxiety seriously and do something about it'

Ella Rhodes spoke to Professor David Putwain (Liverpool John Moores University), co-editor in Chief for the British Journal of Educational Psychology, and author of the new book Understanding and Helping to Overcome Exam Anxiety: What Is It, Why Is It Important and Where Does It Come From?, part of the Ask the Experts series produced by the British Psychological Society and Routledge. 

How did you come to write your new book?

I've been researching exam and test anxiety for 21 years now. Prior to that I was a teacher and A-level examiner, so I was heavily involved in preparing students for exams and the 'black box' between students taking their exams and receiving their grade. I've always been interested in the psychological processes that are going through students' minds when they're preparing for and taking exams, and the interface with the machinery of the marking and awarding process. That is one of the reasons why I started researching test anxiety.

My interest has three angles – one is why some students become, and remain, highly text anxious; the second is the effect on achievement, well-being, and motivation; and the third is what can be about it. For around the past five years or so, I had been thinking it would be nice to bring all these strands together, and then the BPS Ask the Experts series came along and they contacted me to write the book. It was too good an opportunity to not accept.

Who is the book intended for?

Principally teachers but also other staff working in schools, and teachers who work in support roles. It could also be useful for school counsellors and psychological practitioners. It was nice to write a book intended for users and practitioners as much as it was for academics. It feels like the book gets to the audience who might be able to utilise it and benefit from it the most.

Could you give me a sense of some of the impacts of test and exam stress and anxiety?

There seems to be a common misconception that the relationship between exam performance and stress or anxiety follows an inverted U-shape, commonly known as the Yerkes–Dodson law. The idea is that with little stress or anxiety, you don't perform well. A moderate level of stress or anxiety is optimal for performance and too much stress or anxiety negatively impacts performance.

This 'law' sounds plausible, but unfortunately is not backed by evidence. The level of misconception about this amongst laypeople and academics is extraordinary. You find repeated references to the Yerkes-Dodson paper, which was published in 1908, but the problem is nobody reads it. The study wasn't about exams, it wasn't about stress or anxiety, and it wasn't even a study done with humans!

In reality, the relationship between exam anxiety and performance is pretty much negative – the beneficial effect of a small amount of anxiety is minuscule. It is also important to differentiate stress and anxiety. Although the terms are used interchangeably they are not the same thing. By stress, people mean being under pressure. This does not necessarily result in anxiety. It is only when people feel they cannot cope with the pressure, or it is seen as a threat, that they become anxious, and their performance suffers. Some persons respond to stress as a challenge, and the demands made of them can be met with effort. In this case, stress can be a real motivator and performance will benefit. It's not necessarily the amount of stress but rather how people interpret and respond to it that affects performance.

There is an overwhelming body of evidence that exam anxiety is damaging for achievement and learning. Lots of studies only measure anxiety and achievement, but you end up with a chicken-and-egg question. Is anxiety resulting in low achievement or those students with low achievement who become more anxious. When anxiety and achievement are measured longitudinally, over several waves, you find negative relations in both directions. Anxiety results in low achievement and low-achieving students become more anxious.

What are some useful strategies for helping students cope with exam and test anxiety?

People in all kinds of different ways and roles can help. That includes teachers, support staff and those responsible for student wellbeing. It could also include parents and psychologists. 

When preparing students for exams one of the key things with exam anxiety is the feeling that learning and exam outcomes can be controlled. Anxiety is exacerbated by the feeling that they are not within one's sphere of control. Obviously, there will always be a level of uncertainty for unseen exams in the sense that you don't know what questions are going to be in advance. However, it is still possible to build confidence in the things one can control.

One is for teachers to use strategy-informed feedback. This involves using feedback to help students to understand why they got something right or wrong, or why they received a higher or lower mark for a piece of work. Students need to be able to understand the link between their strategy and the outcome. When students understand why they performed how they did, and what strategies they were using that led to that outcome, their feelings of control will increase and exam anxiety will lower.

Another strategy many teachers already use is a lot of exam practice combined with exam strategy. It is teaching students to think like examiners – how and when marks are awarded – and the knowledge of how to gain a higher mark; this type of answer is worth so many marks and so on. That will also help to develop a sense of control. I say that through slightly gritted teeth because it's essentially 'teaching to the test' which some would rightly argue is not what education should be about.

Tutorial support staff working alongside teachers could help students to try different revision strategies in low-stakes settings. Students in general seem very good at planning revision, but not at judging whether their revision is effective or not. Revision strategies tend to be subject-specific, and students will find they are better suited to one strategy or another. Students need to be supported to try out different strategies in low-stakes settings and work out which ones they find the most effective by putting them to the test. Practice them and see what works. It is also a good idea to build repeated testing, or repeated checking of learning, into revision.

Those are all behavioural methods to reduce exam anxiety, but there are also emotional interventions that can help students to relax if they 'freeze' or 'go blank' during an exam. There are numerous deep breathing strategies – diaphragmatic breathing and box breathing for example – that are good at bringing people out of a panicky state quickly. Other strategies include progressive muscle relaxation and visualisation. Students like these techniques because they are simple to learn and there are lots of videos online that teach them – and you can employ them anywhere.

What do you think most needs to change in this area?

There's a lot of top-down pressure in the education system that's enacted by the government and Ofsted down to school management and teachers who become conduits for passing pressure onto students. The standard political response to this criticism is that it is 'driving up standards'. To me, that is a rhetorical fallacy because it is impossible to argue against. Of course, everybody wants high standards. We need to unpick the argument of why high standards has to mean everybody performing well on high-stakes tests.

If you want to rewind about 40 or maybe even 50 years to a classic study by a Scottish psychologist called John Raven, he found about a third of adolescents were well suited to academic education, about a third can tolerate it until they leave school, and another third who were unsuited to this approach. The question we need to ask is whether this is the best way to educate en masse our young people? The present system is designed for that third of people who are well suited to academic education. I think we've got to restart the discussion about the actual purpose of education.

A more radical proposal would be to get rid of high-stakes exams. Why do we need high-stakes exams? There will be arguments for and against but I would like to restart a debate about the use of high-stakes exams rather than de facto – this is the way we 'have' to assess children in schools and colleges.

What can be done more in schools and colleges is to take the issue of exam anxiety seriously to ensure that those children and adolescents who need support are receiving it. Some of the strategies I've spoken about are inexpensive and brief, it is changing what's being done in some cases rather than necessarily adding to what's being done.

Do you have any unanswered questions about exams and test anxiety?

One of the things I've been researching recently is the idea that you've got clinical anxiety, based on diagnosis and is taken seriously, versus non-clinical anxiety which isn't. It forces you into a dichotomy that one is important and serious, and deserving of support and intervention, whereas the other is not.

Someone who is just below the threshold of clinical anxiety still has a lot of anxiety, they are still distressed and still need support. In this respect, those people just below the threshold have more in common with people with a diagnosis than those who are very low in anxiety. However, all non-clinically anxious people get lumped into the same box. A more effective approach would be to judge the level of support and intervention people require proportional to their level of distress and dysfunction rather than whether they are above or below a threshold.

Associated with this idea are the transdiagnostic mechanisms that underpin anxiety. What is the difference, for instance, between Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and somebody who gets highly exam anxious? The psychological mechanisms underpinning the different forms of anxiety seem to be very similar: unhelpful beliefs about anxiety (for instance, that it is a good way of coping), paying attention to threats and dealing with threats in ways that maintain or magnify them. Something else I would like to try is a light touch intervention for exam anxiety to teach coping skills. If such an intervention was effective that would be another inexpensive way to support students.  

Are there any particularly key takeaway messages you hope readers learn from your book?

Yes, take the issue of exam anxiety seriously, because it is damaging to learning, achievement and well-being. Second, it is relatively straightforward to do something about it. So, take it seriously and do something about it.