New research published on test anxiety among school-aged adolescents

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.