Test anxiety control training

How It Works (Rationale)

(for practitioners)

The rationale section is for researchers to analyze and perhaps improve upon our method.  If you are simply interested in the benefits, go to the next section (Benefits).

Curtails anxiety and introduces challenge

The treatment is an emotional reprograming, accelerated by stretch-tense-deep breath-release relax-suggestionus (STARS) sequences to curtail anxiety and augmented by imagined interest in the testing scenes.

The STARS sequences act about four times faster than simple relaxation, and produce a comfortable state in which students are more focused and more receptive to positive suggestions. Students imagine an especially interesting activity, and re-experience the sense of interest. Then, by suggestion, students imagine being interested in a series of eight learning, review, and testing scenes.

Additional STARS sequences are included between scenes, to curb anxiety and to reinstate the calmness and prepare students for the next scenes. The vivid experience of release and safety at the conclusion of a stressful scene conditions the student to perceive the situation as safe and no longer frightening.

Sequencing

The intervention is thus a combination of active physical participation to control anxiety and adaptive attitudes to improve your outlook. 

Ordinarily, it would be far-fetched to propose that highly test anxious students could take pleasure in anything remotely connected to a test. And yet, in the special sequencing here, students can and do imagine enjoying learning, organizing, and then showing their mastery on a test. And after you imagine being interested in the scenes, it is a short step to feeling that interest in the actual situations.

Go to the (Benefits) page

Go to research page