For many students and young people, the experience of sitting exams can be stressful.
But the impact of stress and anxiety on exam performance is not clear.
New research published recently in Psychological Science, by Maria Theobald at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and her colleagues, is its not the pressure of the exam hall causing the problem.
The researchers hoped to test what impact stress and anxiety in the exam hall had on performance. It could be that stress spurs students to fire on all cylinders and perform well in an important exam. On the other hand, exam hall stress could lead to students struggling to remember important information and properly show what they know and can do.
Skill-deficit models assume that test-anxious students show deficits not only in retrieving information but also in organizing, encoding, and storing information. Several previous studies have also found that test-anxious students report poor study skills, which may contribute to ineffective knowledge acquisition.
