The topic of exam stress comes up at the end of every semester, but a recent post on Dan Mitchell's "Teachnology" blog points to a new twist on this old topic: how test anxiety impacts good students. An interesting article in the "health" section of today's NY Times -- "Why Students Struggle When Pressure Is On", by Benedict Carey elucidates. The article reports that the extra pressure of an exam actually psychologically impairs the better students in a class, while having little effect on the mediocre ones. This comes from a fascinating study that is actually available online, "Why High Powered People Fail: Working Memory and 'Choking Under Pressure' in Math" (.pdf file) by cognitive psychologists Thomas Carr
and Sian Bielock, first published in the journal, Psychological Science. Test anxiety, according to the study, consumes the working memory capacity that high achievers rely on for their superior performance, particularly skill execution and the capacity to retain verbal information. Beilock and Carr write:

If pressure and anxiety target those high in working memory capacity, it would carry significant implications for interpreting performance in high-pressure situations (e.g., college entrance exams). First, it would suggest that individuals most equipped to handle difficult, working-memory-intensive situations...are the ones most likely to “blow it” under pressure. Second, as working memory capacity is known to mediate and predict higher-level functions from comprehension to learning (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), such results would call into question the ability of performance in high-pressure situations to differentiate those most qualified to succeed from those with less capacity-related potential.

In other words, the "A" students are most susceptible to "choking under pressure," which means that tests don't reward them with challenges and may be punishing them, despite their facility, knowledge and skill. Another way of thinking about this is that tests don't adequately measure skills the way we think they do. Getting an "A" on a test may instead be a grade on one's ability to handle stress, which is rarely listed under "course objectives" on a class syllabus.

I didn't give any tests this term and I usually have students demonstrate their skills and knowledge via small quizzes and papers throughout the semester. But I do give tests in literature and film survey courses, not only because retaining historical information is important to those fields but also because any serious literary student needs to prepare for taking the GRE if they hope to go on to graduate school.

This material caught my eye because of a recent blog entry I enjoyed --"Exams: Hard vs. Unfair" -- by my colleague at SHU, Dennis Jerz. Jerz gave a very tough exam recently to his American Lit class, and took it as a compliment when a chemistry major told him afterward that his test was the most difficult she'd ever taken in her life. Jerz and the girl exchanged a wink and a nod, both proud of the challenge posed and met. I'd be proud, too, because it meant that I'd stimulated the strong student. Jerz writes:

I figure it's my job to challenge students. I'll curve the exam, of course... but students who work hard all term deserve the chance to demonstrate just how good they really are. They all deserve an intellectual challenge, and I'm happy to give it to them. It's only fair.

I've also harbored this assumption: that offering an "intellectual challenge" to a student is a just way to reward them for their scholarship. But I'm starting to rethink my assumptions about tests and the type of challenges they pose, because surviving a stressful exam unscathed -- while a skill -- isn't exactly a learning objective or a criterion for success in my field. Besides, I try to pose "intellectual challenges" all year, so a exceedingly difficult final won't be necessary. For the student, an excessively difficult test is felt as "unfair" not becuase of the challenge, but because it threatens to tumble the grade they've been building up all term. The problem is the betrayal of the endgame: while even the "A" students might be up for the challenge, they'll still be anxious because of the threat the exam poses to their final grade. When a climber reaches the top of the mountain, only to find another, taller, mountain waiting on the other side, then even the best of them don't think they "deserve the challenge." Instead, they think God is a sadist and -- like Job -- they must endure.

A challenging exam is a great way for the students who have done the work to show off their knowledge and skills, if they can handle the pressure. I think the trick is to be very careful about preparing the class for it. I try to do this by giving tough quizzes all term -- mini-versions of the exam with challenges of the same magnitude -- and even an end of year "practice" exam or study session. I know, from our private conversations, that Jerz assigns a lot of writing in his class, so the "challenge" in his exam was certainly prepared for by having students answer essay questions in the final test. That's smart. I'm certain that writing about literature, too, is a learning objective in that course, and that's another point to remember: that an exam should clearly be designed to adjudicate how well the student has met the objectives for the course. The trick is to be challenging while not generating animosity of any kind and not generating more stress than would normally be required in the field. (Another option, of course, is to waive the exam for the A students and proctor a "less challenging" test that examines basic skills.)

When I put together a creative writing course, I typically assign quizzes and a challenging midterm but no final. I figure that the midpoint of the term is the point by which the students in the room can be assumed to share a certain knowledge set that will enable them to share discourse professionally about writing. Since I tend to assess students progressively, guaging their process rather than the end-product of their learning, this works great. After the midterm, writing workshops go much more smoothly, since everyone has learned what they need to in order to "talk the talk" of writers.

A question I have that I'm still musing over is not what does a test measure, but what does a student learn from taking a test? Accountability for what they learned. The discipline of studying for an exam. And perhaps even the skill of performance under pressure. These are valid outcomes, but not necesarily course objectives. I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

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