Want to help your students tackle their exams with confidence this fall? It helps to give them a plan of attack. You’ve probably noticed that year after year, many students make the same test-taking mistakes.
We’ve assembled some tips for you to share with your students. These are starting points – feel free to add your own!
It’s October. You might feel a chill in the air. You might crave a pumpkin spice latte. And educators might sense a lot of text anxiety in the classroom. Test anxiety rises as the SATs and ACTs approach and for some students, the effects can be debilitating. The American Test Anxieties Association website reports that 16–20% of students have high test anxiety.
For many people, the thought of writing a test is the stuff of nightmares. For those no longer in school, being back there and having to write a test is actually a common nightmare! But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to help students overcome test anxiety.
“Life is full of evaluations; tests just happen to be part of that,” says David Ross, professor emeritus at a college in Illinois. “Some situations we can avoid, [but] it’s hard to avoid tests if you are in school. It is hard to separate how you feel about yourself from your performance on tests.”
The first step in understanding test anxiety is recognizing that, well, it’s difficult to understand.
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