![]() In another experiment researchers showed that it wasn’t just the act of writing that inoculated students against choking rather, specifically writing about test–related thoughts and feelings had helped. “Control participants ‘choked under pressure,’ showing a 12 percent accuracy drop from pre–test to post–test, whereas students who expressed their thoughts before the high–pressure test showed a significant 5 percent math accuracy improvement.” ‘Thinking about the consequences of failing’ “The expressive writing group performed significantly better than the control group,” the authors write. Half of the students then received 10 minutes to write expressively about their feelings about the upcoming test (expressive writing group), and the other half was told to sit quietly (control group). Students also were told that their work would be videotaped, and that math teachers would review it. Before the second test, researchers created a situation designed to produce stress, by saying students who performed well would receive money and that other students were depending on their performance as part of a team effort. On the first test, students were told simply to do their best. To test those ideas, researchers recruited 20 college students and gave them two short math tests. The researchers also predicted that just one round of writing immediately before a big event would be sufficient to curb choking and boost students’ test scores. “We reasoned that if worries lead to poor test performance, and writing helps regulate these worries, then giving students the opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings about an impending examination would enhance test performance,” Beilock said. In the current research, the scholars wanted to determine if students could benefit from writing in the classroom, so they first tested college students to determine if writing about their anxieties improved their performance on a mathematics test. Other research has shown that expressive writing, in which people repeatedly write about a traumatic or emotional experience over several weeks or months, is an effective technique for decreasing worries in depressed individuals. Joining Beilock on the study was her graduate student Gerardo Ramirez, an Institute of Education Sciences predoctoral fellow at UChicago. “Despite the fact that people are often motivated to perform their best, the pressure–filled situations in which important tests, presentations and matches occur can cause people to perform below their ability level instead,” Beilock said. Her recently published book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, gives advice on how to avoid choking in situations ranging from high–stakes exams to important business presentations and athletic competitions. That can sap the brain power necessary to excel.īeilock is one of the nation’s leading experts on “choking under pressure”-a phenomenon in which talented people perform below their skill level when presented with a particularly challenging experience. But it is a limited resource, and when worries creep up, the working memory people normally use to succeed becomes overburdened. Working memory is a sort of mental scratch pad that allows people to retrieve and use information relevant to the task at hand. In other research, Beilock has shown that pressure–filled situations can deplete a part of the brain’s processing power known as working memory, which is critical to many everyday activities. The writing exercise allowed students to unload their anxieties before taking the test and accordingly freed up brainpower needed to complete the test successfully-brainpower that is normally occupied by worries about the test, explained the study’s senior author, Sian Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University. 14 issue of Science and is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation. Researchers found that students who were prone to test anxiety improved their high–stakes test scores by nearly one grade point after they were given 10 minutes to write about what was causing them fear, according to the article, “Writing about Testing Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom.” The article appears in the Jan. Students can combat test anxiety and improve performance by writing about their worries immediately before the exam begins, according to a University of Chicago study published in the journal Science. ![]()
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