It's a feeling you've almost experienced before—the fear of waiting for an exam to start. You worry about whether you've prepared well, and about the possible failure. Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock have found that students do better in exams if they spend ten minutes writing about their worries.
At first, Ramirez and Beilock tested their solution in the lab. They asked 20 college students to take two math tests. Before the first test, the students were simply told to do their best. Before the second test, each student was assigned (分配) a partner who had already finished and improved on their original score. If the student could do the same, both partners would get money. If not, neither would get anything.
Before they started the second test, half of the students sat quietly and the other half wrote openly about their feelings on the coming exam. Ramirez and Beilock found that although both groups scored similar marks in the first relaxed test, the writing group did much better at the second test. Their scores improved; rising by an extra 5%. And the students who sat quietly actually did worse; their marks were 12% lower.
But was it the act of writing itself that did the trick? To answer that, Ramirez and Beilock ran the experiment again in a real setting. This time, they worked with 51 ninth-grade students. Six weeks before the final biology exam, they asked the students how anxious (焦虑的) they were. When the final hour arrived, the students were asked for a 10-minute writing exercise. Half of them had to write about their thoughts on the coming exam, while the other half had to write about an unrelated topic. Only then did they sit the exam.
Their final scores showed that if the students wrote about unrelated topics, their scores were lower. If they wrote about their worries, their anxieties had no effect on their marks. And when Ramirez divided the students into two groups according to how anxious they were, only the high group benefited from the exercise.
Ramirez and Beilock's study has obvious practical effect. They've found a simple way of helping the anxious students to perform at their true level. They've also shown that the key to control our anxieties is not to push them aside, but to face them.
