A lot of us are nearing the end of the spring semester and students are gearing up to take some high stakes exams. For a lot of students, final exams create a sense of dread and a lot of anxiety. As if they weren’t worried enough, that worry can actually cause worse performance on exams (1). One of the mechanisms for the lower performance may have to do with working memory. When students are worried about their performance, that anxiety takes up some space in working memory that could be devoted to effortful recall or problem solving (2). We’ve talked about this issue before, but today I want to walk you through one specific strategy that can reduce the impact that anxiety has on working memory in the moments just before an exam.
While this strategy has been used in many domains, today I am focusing on a research study showing that expressive writing can be used to reduce math anxiety and improve performance on a math exam (3). In this particular study, students were given a standard math anxiety assessment and divided into groups: those with low math anxiety and those with high math anxiety. All of the participants were then given a really hard practice exam so that individuals with math anxiety would start to feel anxious. The groups were then split into two experimental conditions. In the control condition, students sat quietly for 7 minutes while waiting to take a final math test. In the expressive writing condition, students were asked to write as openly as possible about their feelings associated with the math exam they were about to take. Then all of the participants took the same test, which included easy and hard math problems.
