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This could be something to send home to parents....

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This could be something to send home to parents....

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The Anxiety-Free Child Program - Help Your Child With Anxiety Today

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Never mind drugs, a shoddy home life or an inability to make friends, the top reason students become "scholastically impaired" is that thing called test anxiety. Test anxiety is more than getting a little jittery before a big exam. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) notes it's a full-fledged psychological condition, a form of performance anxiety from which your child may suffer before a test or any type of challenge.

Test anxiety can hit before, during or after the exam - and may even show up as early as the beginning of the school year if your child knows one of those grand standardized exams is set for his or her grade that year.

While no exact figures are available, the American Test Anxiety Association estimates up to 20 percent of students may be afflicted with severe text anxiety and 18 percent may suffer from a moderately high form of the condition. That leaves only about 60 percent of students without some form of text anxiety.

If your child suffers from text anxiety, he or she is certainly not alone. The chances of test anxiety are also increased if your child already suffers from social anxiety. But your child's suffering does not have to continue. The more you realize what's happening when test anxiety hits, the better able you'll be able to help your anxious child get through it and the less ominous those scary standardized exams or homework challenges will be.

Causes and Effects of Test Anxiety

One of the common causes of test anxiety is not properly preparing for a test, ADAA says. The feeling of being overwhelmed and lost when faced with a major challenge can be enough to send anyone into an anxiety pit, especially if he or she did have time to prepare but simply chose not to.

The type of test anxiety many anxious children endure, however, may have little or nothing to do with preparation. It may erupt even if your child spent hours, weeks or months preparing for the test. It can hit with take-home assignments during which he or she can use the book.

Causes of this type of anxiety may go much deeper than bad study habits. It can stem from that thing called fear.

Fear of failure: Although some children (and adults) look at a challenge as a way to improve themselves, others see it as their potential downfall. This is especially true for students who think their level of self-worth, acceptance and validation are all tied together and dependant on the outcome of a test.
Example: The middle school student who wept and was afraid to go home when his test grade came back as a B+.
Fear of repeating past poor test performance. One or more bad test experiences can set the stage for test anxiety for years to come. Your child may believe that every test that ever comes down the pike will be as horrific as those that came before. Every instance of the "t-word" thereafter can pump your child's mind full of negativity and affect his or her performance.
Example: The student who had a particularly bad test in chemistry, his weakest subject, who suddenly starts performing badly on tests in English, his strongest subject. So what happens when a child suffering from test anxiety is confronted with the beast?
Students with test anxiety can simply freeze up when faced with a test. Their minds can go totally blank. They may stare at the paper in horror or attempt to guess randomly at answers. Even if students know the correct answers, high test anxiety messes up people's working memory and reasoning abilities and increases the number of mistakes they make.

"Students with high anxiety perform around 12 percentile points below their low anxiety peers (about six tenths of a letter grade below)," the American Test Anxiety Association reports.

Test Anxiety Symptoms

As with most forms of anxiety, test anxiety can affect your child on the physical, emotional, behavioral and cognitive levels. The ADAA offers a rundown:

Physical: Sweating, shaking, shortness of breath, headache, nausea and diarrhea are common symptoms of test anxiety, as is feeling lightheaded or faint. Hyperventilation or a full-blown panic attack may be part of the mix, making students feel like they cannot breathe or are suffering from a heart attack.

Emotional: Students may become angry, or they may fall into a slump of helplessness, fear and despair. Disappointment is also common.

Behavioral and cognitive: Negative thinking takes the lead as one of the top cognitive symptoms of test anxiety, followed by problems with concentration. Students may start to compare themselves with others, looking around to see who seems to be acing the test, assuming others may be smarter than them.

These symptoms can crop up in people of any age, especially with an intense focus on super-exams for younger and younger students.

"The pressure to do well on achievement tests for college is filtering its way down to lower grades, so that even third graders feel as if they are on trial," The New York Times Magazine reports.

Genetics and Short-Term Stress

While any test or challenge can create test anxiety, standardized-type tests have a certain flair for making that anxiety particularly intense. Part of the reason for this intensity is the view of a single test, or performance, as the end-all for the overall score.

Class work means nothing. Participation means nothing. Working harmoniously in a group or volunteering to pound erasers after school means absolutely nothing. A student's entire worth and value is gauged by his or her performance on a single exam. That kind of pressure is enough to drive anyone to the pits of anxiety, although not everyone takes that deep dive.

How your child reacts to such an intense, short-term stress can be partly dependent on a specific gene known as the COMT gene, NYT Magazine says. This particular gene contributes to how quickly or slowly someone's brain clears dopamine out of its prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for decisions, planning and conflict resolution. Those with the gene that leads to a quick clearing-out are known as the "warriors" while those with a slow clearing-out are dubbed the "worriers."

Flood the area with dopamine and a person's brain goes into high drive.

Those who have the quick-acting warrior COMT gene tend to do better under short-term, intense bouts of stress - which is exactly what a standardized-type test tends to offer. While the fast-acting warrior gene works well for short-term stress, laboratory research showed those who have the slow-acting worrier COMT gene do better with other types of cognitive tasks, such as IQ tests, games and puzzles.

A study of Beijing students additionally showed those with the slow-acting gene had an average IQ that was 10 points higher than those with the fast-acting one. Another study out of Taiwan, however, showed students with the slow-acting gene averaged 8 percent lower than their fast-acting gene peers on a national exam.

That may help explain why your smart-as-a-whip, high-IQ child doesn't seem to score well on intensely stressful standardized exams. It can also clear up why the student who is not all that sharp overall can really kick butt during those same exams.

About half of the population has a mixture of the two types of genetic codes, with an estimated 25 percent holding only the fast-acting warrior gene and another 25 percent having only the slow-acting worrier variety, according to the NYT Magazine.

And regardless of the type of COMT genes your child has, there are several ways you can help reduce test anxiety across the board.

Tips for Helping Your Child with Test Anxiety

A number of helpful hints for helping your child cope with test anxiety come from the NYT article, the ADAA and an article by author and Psychology Today writer Annie Murphy Paul. Some are fairly straightforward while others may take a little - or a lot - of practice. Let's start with the fairly straightforward batch and work our way upward.

Help your child prepare. Teaching your child effective study techniques and test-taking skills can take care of anxiety that comes from being ill-prepared. It can also help boost your child's confidence, as it's typically much easier to meet a challenge when you know you've done all you can do to be ready for it.

Study techniques that can be helpful include regular reviews of the material, flash cards and practice tests. Starting regular study sessions a week or two in advance can eradicate the high-stress activity of cramming.

Test-taking techniques that can help include reading each question carefully, going through the entire test to answer questions you know first and going back to the others and cracking tough multiple-choice questions by process of elimination with the answers. Children facing written essay exams can benefit by learning to create an outline of their thoughts before they start writing.

Work on maintaining focus. Since one of the effects of test anxiety is the habit of looking around at other students and thinking everyone is smarter, reviewing focus techniques with your child may help nip that habit in the bud. Reinforce that the only thing that should grab your child's focus is the test in front of him or her, not the boy in the next seat, the girl in the next aisle or the bird sitting on the window sill.

Check out a number of suggestions in our that can help your child learn to focus. Such a skill can not only make test-taking easier, but it can reduce anxiety in general and enhance the overall quality of life.

Purge anxieties on paper. All that anxiety packed in your anxious child's brain has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is usually the part of the brain that controls a person's working memory. Letting the anxiety stay in the brain and fester tends to crowd out other thoughts and decrease the working memory's effectiveness.

Instead of keeping the anxieties harbored inside, students may do well to purge them by writing them out on paper shortly before the exam.

A study published in Science checked out the effectiveness of having a group of students purge their anxieties on paper before sitting down to take the test. Such purging, known in psychology circles as "expressive writing," led to a significant improvement in test scores, Annie Murphy Paul reports.

Go for relaxation exercises. A study published in the Journal of School Counseling backed up relaxation techniques as a phenomenal means of reducing test anxiety, according to Murphy Paul. The study had a group of third-grade students lie on classroom mats, close their eyes and engage in focused breathing and muscle relaxation exercises. The group of relaxed students had lower levels of test anxiety than another group that not indulge in relaxation techniques.

Relaxation techniques can consist of any number of ways to reduce stress and anxiety. Common methods include breathing exercises, such as those pointed out in our post Teaching Your Anxious Child to Calm Themselves with Their Breath. You can also try a popular exercise of having children start at their heads and move down through their toes flexing and relaxing every muscle of their bodies.

Another relaxation solution, which can be helpful for the long-term and used on a daily basis, is guided imagery and meditation. Use tips from our meditation and guided imagery for anxious children post to set up a daily practice with your child so you can both reap the soothing benefits.

Change your child's mindset about stress. Test anxiety may result in stomach full of butterflies and a heart that feels like it's about to beat out of the chest, but that rush can be used to your child's advantage.

University of Rochester assistant professor Jeremy Jamieson found this out through a series of experiments with college students primed to take the G.R.E.s, NYT Magazine reports. Jamieson told a group of students that those with anxiety would actually do better on a test - and they did. A switch of mindset that anxiety was beneficial instead of detrimental boosted test scores by 50 points on a practice test and by 65 points on the actual G.R.E.

A total mindset switch does not usually happen overnight, but rather involves the same repeated practice that can benefit all of these suggestions.

One more tip is to stay positive. Here's where the pep talk comes in. Remind your child that, no matter what happens with any test, he or she is a wonderful, beautiful, worthwhile individual who is deeply cherished and loved.

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The Parents Guide to Helping Anxious Children Cope with Test Anxiety

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Never mind drugs, a shoddy home life or an inability to make friends, the top reason students become "scholastically impaired" is that thing called test anxiety. Test anxiety is more than getting a little jittery before a big exam.

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Music is a great tool of therapy. It can help calm them down. Playing some of their favorite can put them in a safe place.

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Whether it's a unit test, or high-stakes state assessment, some students will suffer from test anxiety. Included in this post is a video demonstrating activities that act

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Many may think they are just the ones having this problem but it effects many. You have to find a way to make them feel comfortable.

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It is important as an educator that I know what to do to help my students overcome it. I want them to achieve greatness and success so I must do everything I can to help them do their best!

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I have heard these theories before and it is often times why so many teachers do not try and understand because they think they are faking.

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Test anxiety is not just something that is made up. It is a real thing that lives inside of people

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For many students, college admission tests are accompanied by unpleasant physical and emotional side effects - heart palpitations, distractibility, nervousness, self-doubt - which sometimes lead to lackluster scores. We subsume all of these phenomena into the category of 'test anxiety.'

Although test anxiety is common enough, its physiological underpinnings remain a mystery to most. Fortunately, research on the brain and its partner-in-crime, the autonomic nervous system, has exploded in the last few decades. New technology, especially fMRI scans, has illuminated the inner workings of the brain and its various mental states, including fear and anxiety.

In this post, I will review the neurological origins of anxiety and suggest solutions for managing it. I will primarily pull from the research and insights of Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist and best-selling author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom. Hanson's book is particularly useful, because it pairs esoteric brain research with practical exercises that help soothe an anxious mind. At the crux of Hanson's text is the belief that contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism, allow us to rewire our brains and undo psychological suffering at its root.

The Threat-Response Mechanism

A basic understanding of the anatomy of the brain and the threat-response mechanism is necessary to comprehend test anxiety.

First, from an evolutionary perspective, we know that our brain is comprised of both ancient 'subcortical' structures (e.g. the limbic system) and more complex, human 'cortical' structures (e.g. the prefrontal cortex). Subcortical structures primarily evolved for the purpose of survival; they allow us to detect threats, activate the body to avoid threats, and stow away memories of threats to prevent future occurrences.

Conversely, cortical structures allow us to do the more complex reasoning and emotional work that are central to humanity as a species. Generally speaking, subcortical structures are more readily activated or 'favored' by the brain, because they are responsible for keeping us alive. Favoritism toward subcortical structures, however, becomes problematic when these structures activate at inappropriate times (like when taking the SAT).

In a highly simplified way, this is how our brain and body respond to threats:

Physical, psychological, and emotional threats all trigger the brain in similar ways. In Rick Hanson's words, threats and suffering 'cascade through your body' via the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA) of the endocrine (hormonal) system.

The amygdala, a subcortical structure, signals a neural alarm bell that prompts the following processes:

Stimulates the brain stem, which releases norepinephrine throughout the body, shunting blood to important muscle groups (i.e. those necessary for attack or escape).

Galvanizes the hypothalamus - the brain's regulator of the endocrine system - which releases cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline). Epinephrine increases heart rate while cortisol puts the brakes on the immune system to prevent inflammation of potential wounds.

Intensifies emotions and prioritizes the encoding of negative affect into the brain. The hippocampus, which is responsible for recording new, accurate memories is shut down.

Increases the output of stress hormones that inhibit the executive control of cortical structures. In extreme cases, our working memory, which is responsible for retaining sophisticated linguistic and spatial information, is wiped clean to make room for more automatic physical and mental actions.

As you can imagine, the SNS/HPAA system was handy for early man as he fended off dangerous predators. However, in today's world, blowing up your sympathetic nervous system does more harm than good. A hyperactive SNS will make you hot-headed, irrational, aggressive, and - as we will discuss in a moment - unnecessarily anxious.

So What Is Anxiety?
Psychological and Physiological Origins
Much of the pain we experience in life is unavoidable: physical pain results from our aging, mortal bodies; emotional pain derives from the eventual loss of loved ones. However, a great deal of our daily suffering is rooted in our appraisals of pain and our reactions to it.

According to Hanson, the unavoidable discomfort of life is what Buddha called the 'first dart of existence.' Our maladaptive responses to these first darts - guilt about our actions, anger regarding our circumstances, or anxiety about unfavorable outcomes - are known as 'second darts.' Second darts are psychological in nature and can enact the SNS/HPAA system with just as much potency as physical threat or pain.
To use Hanson's language, anxiety is a mental consequence (among many others) of throwing second darts at ourselves. Now let's get to the biology of anxiety:
When the SNS/HPAA system and amygdala are triggered too often, they lead to the rapid arousal of state anxiety (anxiety based on specific situations). Additionally, the amygdala helps form implicit memories (traces of past experiences beneath consciousness) that are colored with fear and lead to trait anxiety (ongoing anxiety regardless of the situation).

As I mentioned earlier, activation of the amygdala suppresses the formation of explicit memories, which leads to the encoding of distorted, emotionally-laden implicit memories. The outcome: individuals feel uncomfortably 'keyed up' and stressed during an activity - like test-taking - and can't figure out why. An anxious test-taker likely has a sensitized amygdala and fearful implicit memories of past testing experiences that surface without conscious awareness.

What Is Test Anxiety?

On its face, test anxiety is easy to define. It is an overactive, often unconscious threat-response that is triggered by the act of testing. The more complex aspects of test anxiety involve the unique configurations of 'second darts' that affect each student.
Second Darts for Test-Takers
Beyond the grueling, four-hour slog that typifies college admission tests (an unavoidable 'first dart'), students may be stymied by any number of second darts that trigger the SNS/HPAA system. Here are some common second darts that we see in the test prep industry:

A student has a history of poor performances on standardized tests and believes that the SAT/ACT will perpetuate past results. He has immense shame about previous test scores and is self-defeating in his assumptions about the future: "I'll never be any good at testing."

A student fears that the college admission test will define his educational and professional trajectory in life, which shades the exam with excessive importance and triggers a flight response.

A student is high-achieving and worries that a sub-stellar performance will dramatically undermine a portfolio of academic successes. At a psychological level, he fears the dissolution of an identity - being the 'smart kid' - that is precariously buoyed by grades and test scores.

A student is a part of a minority group and fears that poor performance will confirm negative stereotypes about his identity: gender, race, class, etc. The phenomenon of stereotype threatis well-documented in the field of psychology.

The combination of a rigorous, lengthy, high-stakes exam (first dart) and the added pressure that students place on themselves (second dart) is a recipe for powerful anxiety.

Using the Mind to Eliminate Test Anxiety

After reading about anxiety and the threat-response mechanism, you may feel betrayed by your own mind and body. As I mentioned earlier, we simply do not need the same survival instincts as our mammalian ancestors. Fortunately, our flexible human brains allow us to deliberately curb adverse reactions to suffering - including test anxiety - and enhance our capacities for happiness and peace.
When Neurons Fire Together, They Wire Together
A principle tenet of Hanson's book is the mutual plasticity of the 'mind' and the 'brain.' Hanson shores up a ton of research that shows how our conscious thoughts impact the physical make-up of our brains and bodies, and vice-versa. At a cellular level, the 1.1 billion neurons that constitute our brains connect or disconnect, turn on or off, based on the character of mental events. In fact, even beneath consciousness, every positive and negative emotional episode leaves an indelible trace in our minds.

Unfortunately, because of the biases of subcortical structures, negative events are more easily consolidated into our memories, and our perceptions of the present are more readily drawn to troublesome stimuli. Consequently, it requires real effort to shift the emotional tenor of our thoughts and behaviors to a more positive tone.
Activating the Parasympathetic Nervous System
Although we have examined the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) in detail thus far, its counterbalance, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), is most essential to mitigating test anxiety. Broadly construed, the PNS is what compels the body to 'rest and digest,' especially after the activation of the SNS. The PNS brings the body and its functions to equilibrium - slowing breathing, re-organizing blood flow, resuming digestion, etc. As a result of the PNS, the cortical functions of the brain come into full view, allowing for clear thinking and complex problem-solving.

Ultimately, the PNS yields a sense of tranquility and coolness that students need to tackle college admission tests.

Here are some quick ways to activate the PNS that can be done before or during the administration of a test:

Progressive Relaxation: For 3 to 10 minutes, bring different parts of your body into awareness and tense and relax them. You may move vertically along your body, starting with your feet and ending with your brow.

Big Exhalation: Inhale as much as possible, hold the breath for a few seconds, and slowly exhale. A big inhalation expands your lungs, which then require a big exhalation to bring them back to their resting size. This action stimulates the PNS, which controls exhaling.

Touching the Lips: Parasympathetic fibers are distributed throughout your lips, so touching them activates your PNS. The presence of these fibers is likely linked to early feeding behaviors in infants.

Meditation: Meditative practices are the lifeblood of the PNS. A simple 'mindfulness meditation' involves the monitoring of breathing and the internal sensations of the body for a prolonged period of time. Mindfulness meditation can last anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour depending on the desired depth of the exercise. Research has demonstrated that meditation improves the well-being of the brain by:

Increasing gray matter, which allows for stronger attention.

Increasing activation of left frontal regions, which lifts mood.

Decreasing stress-related cortisol.

Strengthening the immune system.

Conclusion: Above All Else, Be Kind to Yourself

Although test anxiety is chiefly the result of the high-stakes nature of college admission tests, the strength of anxiety and its concomitant affects (e.g. lack of confidence, self-loathing, shame, etc.) can be ameliorated by recognizing second darts and challenging their premises. As I stated before, college admission tests are an inexorable reality of the admission process, however, they don't need to trigger additional emotional baggage. For test-takers who continue to beat themselves up about subpar scores, help them redefine the significance of these exams. Having been in the field of test preparation for nearly a decade, I can confidently say that test scores are not the arbiters of adult success in school and career. For parents reading this post, explain to your students that success in life does not always follow a linear path: immaculate GPA -> great test scores -> college acceptance -> lucrative and fulfilling career.

One of Hanson's most interesting methods for stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system is visualization. More specifically, he advises that we cultivate self-empathy, nullifying the impact of second darts, by imagining ourselves as young children. Hanson asks, 'Would we berate our child selves with the same harshness that we turn toward our adult or adolescent selves?' Definitely not. Your present self is just as deserving of compassion as your 'child-like' self - particularly during the stressful process of college admission testing.

Hopefully what I have written provides a first step toward understanding and coping with test anxiety. I welcome any additional questions or anecdotes related to test anxiety that you would like to share. Compass prides itself in its holistic approach to tutoring, unifying strategy and conceptual teachings with personal empowerment and the abolition of test anxiety.

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For many students, college admission tests are accompanied by unpleasant physical and emotional side effects - heart palpitations, distractibility, nervousness, self-doubt - which sometimes lead to lackluster scores. We subsume all of these phenomena into the category of 'test anxiety.' Although test anxiety is common enough, its physiological underpinnings remain a mystery to most.

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The first step to overcoming something is finding out what triggers you.

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Ben Bernstein, PhD

Feeling stressed out is a very common experience for college
students. So much is new and in flux, and there's a lot of pressure on you to
perform at your best. You shouldn't be surprised that your stress level
directly affects your success in test taking.

In 1908, two scientists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson,
studied the effect of stress on performance. It is one of the most researched
phenomena in psychology. On a graph, stress is on the x axis and performance is
on the y axis. The relationship between the two is a bell curve. Simply put, thep Yerkes-Dodson law shows (1)
when your stress is too high or too low, your performance suffers; and (2) you
need some stress to perform at your best.

We all know that when our stress is too great, we become
preoccupied with the stress itself. Here
are typical comments from students I coach:
"I was so stressed, I could hardly breathe," "When I came to an
unfamiliar question, I froze," "With all that pressure, I couldn't keep my
attention on the test." Less common is
having too little stress: "This test doesn't matter," "I don't care how I do,"
"I don't like this subject anyway." With too much stress, test anxiety takes
you over the top and you can't think through a question. With too little stress
there's no juice. You blow it off.

The ideal place is right in the middle: just enough stress
to feel pumped and ready for action. Athletes call this "the zone," but it
sounds mystical-"Oh, wow, I was in the zone." It's like they found themselves
in a great place but didn't know how they got there.
Getting into the zone
In over thirty years of coaching I've trained college
students to get into the zone consciously. Bar none, this is one of the best
test-taking strategies. You just need to become aware of when your stress is
going past the optimal point and then use tools reduce your stress. If you're
looking for the best test-taking tip, or best test-preparation strategy, this
is it: get yourself into the zone.

When I ask people, "What is stress?" they always point to
things outside themselves: "My French class," "My calculus teacher," "Too much
work." This thinking suggests that for
your stress level to go down, everything outside you has to change. That's not
going to happen. If you want to decrease your stress level, you have to learn
how to keep yourself in the zone. In other words, you need to develop the kind
of study habits that involve using tools to keep yourself calm, confident, and
focused. That's the three-legged stool I wrote about in my last post (February
28), the sturdiest platform for test success on any test.
What triggers your test stress?
In each of my next three posts, I'll give you the tools for
staying calm, confident, and focused. But first you have to become aware of the
triggers that let test anxiety shake your cool, loosen your confidence, or get
you distracted. A trigger is something that happens outside you which fires off
a stress reaction inside: the date of your French final is fast approaching,
you see a tough item on an test, or the person next to you in the exam room is
sighing and fidgeting.

To get a grip on stress, start by becoming aware of your
triggers. Do you know what they are? This is your first step toward the kind of test success you are truly capable
of.

Ben Bernstein, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and
performance coach. He is the author of Test Success: How to Be Calm, Confident and
Focused on Any Test(Spark Avenue, 2012).
www.testsuccesscoach.com

Tags: Overcoming Test Stess

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How Stress Affects Your Test Scores | The College Puzzle

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Ben Bernstein, PhD Feeling stressed out is a very common experience for college students. So much is new and in flux, and there's a lot of pressure on you to perform at your best. You shouldn't be surprised that your stress level directly affects your success in test taking.

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I know that test anxiety is something that a lot of students and even adults struggle. They often times let the pressure of doing well on a test hurt them.

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I want to know how I can help my students overcome test anxiety and how to see for the signs for it.