Publication Date:
2011-01-15
Description:
Two laboratory and two randomized field experiments tested a psychological intervention designed to improve students' scores on high-stakes exams and to increase our understanding of why pressure-filled exam situations undermine some students' performance. We expected that sitting for an important exam leads to worries about the situation and its consequences that undermine test performance. We tested whether having students write down their thoughts about an upcoming test could improve test performance. The intervention, a brief expressive writing assignment that occurred immediately before taking an important test, significantly improved students' exam scores, especially for students habitually anxious about test taking. Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Ramirez, Gerardo -- Beilock, Sian L -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Jan 14;331(6014):211-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1199427.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Psychology and Committee on Education, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21233387" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adolescent
;
*Anxiety
;
Biology/education
;
*Educational Measurement
;
Humans
;
Mathematics/education
;
Students/*psychology
;
Test Taking Skills/*psychology
;
*Writing
;
Young Adult
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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