By: Melanie Miller, Einstein School Counselor.
SBA testing is just around the corner. Some students are able to move through this process with few worries. For others, this test produces anxiety that goes beyond the normal nervousness children may feel before a challenge. Fortunately, for children, and their parents, there are potential solutions to test anxiety that are reasonable simple, inexpensive and as recent studies show, effective.
In her recent Time Magazine article (February 11, 2013), author, consultant and speaker Annie Murphy Paul, shows how test anxiety can be easily relieved. The following research and strategies are taken from her article.
Upload on Paper. When students are overwhelmed with feelings of nervousness, their capacity to think clearly and solve problems is impacted. Their working memory is crowded with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety leaving less room to manipulate facts and ideas. Your child will understand this as “flipping your lid”, a concept that I have taught in all Einstein classrooms. When we are overwhelmed with feelings, our brain “disconnects” or “goes offline” and we temporarily loose our thinking, rational part of our brain. (Daniel Siegel, MD, Parenting the Whole Brain Child, 2010) One way to unlock the feelings and make more room for cognitive functioning is for children to take ten minutes, prior to the test, writing about their thoughts and feelings. This method of “expressive writing” has been show to significantly improve student test scores. (Beilock and Ramirez, Science Journal, 2012). Younger students could try drawing about their feelings or simply sharing what is on their mind, while you write for them.
Affirm your values. Apprehension over tests is especially common among minority and female students. These students may worry that if they do poorly on a test it will reinforce stereotypes already present in our culture. Low test scores may reinforce that girls are not good in math and science or that Latinos and Blacks are not college material or worthy of higher learner. Because of this “stereotype threat”, these students are often dealing with a double dose of worry. A student’s belief system of who they are, what is important to them and what they are capable of contributes to their level of test anxiety. An intervention to help with this is to ask students to choose something they value and write about why it matters to them. A student might choose to write about music, friends, family etc. This “values affirmation” exercise was shown to shrink the performance gap between white and black students by 40 percent! In another, it erased the gap in test scores between women and men enrolled in a challenging college physics course. And again, our younger Einstein Otters could draw a picture of what is of value to them, or tell you, while you do the writing.
Engage in relaxation exercises. Students as young as first and second grade can experience anxiety around testing. Unable to put their worries into words, they may experience stomachaches, difficulty
sleeping and a persistent urge to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. Students can do breathing and relaxation exercises at home and in the classroom by closing their eyes, focusing on their breathing and tensing and relaxing groups of muscles in their legs, arms, stomachs and so on. When possible, it is helpful to lay down during these exercises for complete relaxation. Linda Lantieri’s book Building Emotional Intelligence comes with a DVD to help adults and children practice relaxation techniques which increases their focus, calm and cognitive skills.
Other quick activities that help make our thinking brains work better:
Remind children that the SBA is only one indicator of how they are progressing academically. In class assignments, group work, teacher comments and report cards are other indicators that show progress. Our children are multi faceted with many strengths and talents. Show them that you have faith in them and know that they can find the courage and helpful strategies to work through what is sometimes challenging, overwhelming and scary.
