Head of Education for the School co-author of a paper in an international journal

Congratulations to our Education and Assessment Lead, Dr Suzanne Chamberlain who has had a paper published about students’ coping mechanisms during high stakes national exams. Suzanne is a co-author of ‘Sink or swim’: buoyancy and coping in the cognitive test anxiety – academic performance relationship’ published by Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology. The study explores the relationship between students’ self-report levels of cognitive test anxiety (worry), academic buoyancy (withstanding and successfully responding to routine school challenges and setbacks), coping processes and their achieved grades in high-stakes national examinations at the end of compulsory schooling.

Suzanne and her co-authors sampled 325 students across eight secondary schools in north-west England as they prepared for their GCSE examinations. The students and their measures of anxiety and coping were then matched to further measures of prior attainment and their achieved GCSE grades to understand the impact of test anxiety and coping on examination performance. They concluded that the provision of in-school training in task-focus and orientation and how to withstand academic pressures may help to improve the influence of performance-interfering worries, and potentially enhance performance among students inclined to worry about examinations. Read more. (expired link)