A number of helpful hints for helping your child cope with test anxiety come from the NYT article, the ADAA and an article by author and Psychology Today writer Annie Murphy Paul. Some are fairly straightforward while others may take a little – or a lot – of practice. Let’s start with the fairly straightforward batch and work our way upward.
-Help your child prepare. Teaching your child effective study techniques and test-taking skills can take care of anxiety that comes from being ill-prepared. It can also help boost your child’s confidence, as it’s typically much easier to meet a challenge when you know you’ve done all you can do to be ready for it.
Study techniques that can be helpful include regular reviews of the material, flash cards and practice tests. Starting regular study sessions a week or two in advance can eradicate the high-stress activity of cramming.
Test-taking techniques that can help include reading each question carefully, going through the entire test to answer questions you know first and going back to the others and cracking tough multiple-choice questions by process of elimination with the answers. Children facing written essay exams can benefit by learning to create an outline of their thoughts before they start writing.
-Work on maintaining focus. Since one of the effects of test anxiety is the habit of looking around at other students and thinking everyone is smarter, reviewing focus techniques with your child may help nip that habit in the bud. Reinforce that the only thing that should grab your child’s focus is the test in front of him or her, not the boy in the next seat, the girl in the next aisle or the bird sitting on the window sill.
Check out a number of suggestions in our mindfulness article that can help your child learn to focus. Such a skill can not only make test-taking easier, but it can reduce anxiety in general and enhance the overall quality of life.
-Purge anxieties on paper. All that anxiety packed in your anxious child’s brain has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is usually the part of the brain that controls a person’s working memory. Letting the anxiety stay in the brain and fester tends to crowd out other thoughts and decrease the working memory’s effectiveness.
Instead of keeping the anxieties harbored inside, students may do well to purge them by writing them out on paper shortly before the exam.
A study published in Science checked out the effectiveness of having a group of students purge their anxieties on paper before sitting down to take the test. Such purging, known in psychology circles as “expressive writing,” led to a significant improvement in test scores, Annie Murphy Paul reports.
-Go for relaxation exercises. A study published in the Journal of School Counseling backed up relaxation techniques as a phenomenal means of reducing test anxiety, according to Murphy Paul. The study had a group of third-grade students lie on classroom mats, close their eyes and engage in focused breathing and muscle relaxation exercises. The group of relaxed students had lower levels of test anxiety than another group that not indulge in relaxation techniques.
Relaxation techniques can consist of any number of ways to reduce stress and anxiety. Common methods include breathing exercises, such as those pointed out in our post Teaching Your Anxious Child to Calm Themselves with Their Breath. You can also try a popular exercise of having children start at their heads and move down through their toes flexing and relaxing every muscle of their bodies.
Another relaxation solution, which can be helpful for the long-term and used on a daily basis, is guided imagery and meditation. Use tips from our meditation and guided imagery for anxious children post to set up a daily practice with your child so you can both reap the soothing benefits.
-Change your child’s mindset about stress. Test anxiety may result in stomach full of butterflies and a heart that feels like it’s about to beat out of the chest, but that rush can be used to your child’s advantage.
University of Rochester assistant professor Jeremy Jamieson found this out through a series of experiments with college students primed to take the G.R.E.s, NYT Magazine reports. Jamieson told a group of students that those with anxiety would actually do better on a test – and they did. A switch of mindset that anxiety was beneficial instead of detrimental boosted test scores by 50 points on a practice test and by 65 points on the actual G.R.E.
A total mindset switch does not usually happen overnight, but rather involves the same repeated practice that can benefit all of these suggestions.
One more tip is to stay positive. Here’s where the pep talk comes in. Remind your child that, no matter what happens with any test, he or she is a wonderful, beautiful, worthwhile individual who is deeply cherished and loved.