Dr Suzanne Chamberlain, the School’s Education and Assessment Lead, has recently published work on test anxiety among GCSE students in Educational Psychology in Practice. The paper, ‘Reducing test anxiety among school-aged adolescents: a field experiment’, evaluates whether a purposely designed on-screen intervention could help students minimise and manage their test anxiety. In particular, students who experience test anxiety to such a degree that it is debilitating and prevents them from performing to the best of their ability in examinations.

Results of the study showed that after completing the intervention – and when controlling for academic buoyancy – highly test-anxious students showed a reduction in the worry and tension components of test anxiety, relative to those who did not complete the intervention.

The paper is one of a series of papers produced in collaboration with colleagues at Edge Hill University, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance in Manchester, and University of Australia, Adelaide.