If there’s any mental health issue that’s associated with today’s teens, it’s anxiety.
The numbers are, in fact, shocking:
”According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 31.9% of adolescents aged 13–18 in the United States have an anxiety disorder, with 38% of females and 26.1% of males. Of those with an anxiety disorder, 8.3% have severe impairment.”
This is clearly cause for concern, but what can students who are anxious by temperament do when it comes to standardized tests?
First myth to debunk:
Not all anxiety is inherently bad, nor is it necessarily a predictor of poorer performance. Counterintuitively, too little anxiety can be just as bad for optimal results on any test, including college admissions tests, as too much. This finding is known as the Yerkes–Dodson law. Being alert for important tasks has documented benefits, and it’s likely that any situation that was deemed “important” would have had evolutionary benefits for our ancestors who could have sprung into action.
But the Pythagorean Theorem is not a wild panther, so why do so many students experience test anxiety? One blogger called this fact out:
”The researchers theorize that students with higher test anxiety do poorly on exams not because of constraints on working memory capacity at the time of the exam, but because they had poorer exam preparation leading up to the exam - perhaps as a result of the anxiety leading up to the exam. In other words, the time to address test anxiety is not during the test itself, but during the studying leading up to the test.”
In other words, anxiety is sometimes a logical response to a lack of preparation.
So what can students do to minimize their unhelpful anxiety?
- Avoid too much caffeine (popular energy drinks can push one’s adrenaline too high) and make sure to stay hydrated. Sometimes physical symptoms are misinterpreted as mental distress.
- Avoid rumination about events that have not happened yet. Anxiety often manifests as uncontrolled worrying — a student could ask, what can I control about this situation?
-Practice, practice, practice. Just like an athlete at the Olympics or a musician who knows a song by heart, the best test-takers put in the most time into practicing under test-like conditions.
Of course, your tutor is not your therapist — if your student is showing signs of any mental health challenge that is both persistent and affecting their quality of life, seek out professional help. (Noted educational author and free speech lawyer Greg Lukianoff found Cognitive Behavioral therapy helpful, to name just one example — many, many, many successful and educated individuals have struggled but have found relief in therapy, medication, or a change of environment.)
But if your sense of doom is from a lack of knowing what to expect on test day? That’s what we here at Mindspire are here for. Reach out for more information on our test prep experts’ individual approach.
