Thesis

Today I got my keys for my research carrel in the library at school. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it marks the start of a long and scary journey for me.

My thesis. 

I will probably do another post breaking down what school psychology really is (it took me a long time to really grasp the whole concept.. and I learn more about it every day), but this one will be dedicated to my thesis and the research that I will do while I work on my Master's Degree! 

So here's the topic..

Test Anxiety. 

Jump in to read more about my thesis/test anxiety!

It was important to me in picking my topic to decide what kind of people I would have access to in order to run a study, but it also had to be able to generalize down to public schools, k-12 where I will be working..or it would be a big waste of time for me. Schools are getting so tight now that it's hard to do interventions on children, so I decided to work with undergrads at my school. 

I had planned to do an intervention just on test anxiety(trying to reduce it), but all of my research has shown that although it is possible to decrease test anxiety, unless you change something else too, the person will be less anxious but not necessarily get any better grades. 

Let me see if I can make that make sense..

A lot of times people have test anxiety because even though they study they still don't get the grades they want.. this means that when test time rolls around, although they may have studied and studied, they see the first question and freeze, or think that no matter what they are going to fail. It may be that when they are studying they are not studying in a way that works for them..for example they memorize facts, but do not understand the overall concepts. If they see a question on the test that is not word for word what they memorized, they can't apply the concept to the new words and it causes them stress. 

(this is just one example of why people can be test-anxious)

So, although you can do some things to make them less panicked during the test, unless you also change the ways that they are studying, their grades aren't going to improve just from reducing the anxiety. 

So I'm still looking at the literature and thinking about possible interventions, but if any of you know anyone who has suffered from test anxiety, what has helped them (if anything)? Anything in particular made it worse? 

I'd love to hear input from anyone with experience of test anxiety!