-
Asked by collinsc09 to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 15 Jun 2011.
-
Jenni Tilley answered on 14 Jun 2011:
hmm, I’m sure Helen will be able to tell you a lot about this. Essentially yes, if you get too stressed you can ‘freeze’ and forget everything. However, if that happens all you need to do it take a deep breath and calm yourself down and you should be able to access all that stored information again.
Lots of people find that going for a toilet break or getting a cup of water during an exam helps them relax and refocus.
-
-
Helen O'Connor answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Great question, and so I am going to give this a longer answer, I hope thats OK!
Pressure or anxiety can really interfere with your ability to perform well in an exam even though you are well prepared. From sport psychology, I have learnt that pressure can be both a good and a bad thing, depending on how much of it there is.
This is called the “Inverted U” relationship between performance and pressure:
When there is very little pressure or stress, we aren’t motivated enough to put in much energy, effort, or attention. This is one of the explanations for why some football teams lose matches that everyone thought they would easily win: because they didn’t feel enough pressure to work hard.
As pressure increases it can help us perform really well: the right amount of pressure helps us focus on what we need to do and shut out other distractions, but it doesn’t stop us performing well. This is what some athletes call “getting in the zone”.
Once pressure gets too great we become more stressed and this is when we get distracted, start feeling anxious and thinking negative thoughts. All of these things start to take over our attention and brain becomes so overloaded that our performance suffers. Often, once we have made one mistake, we get even more anxious, and it becomes a vicious cycle. So even though we have revised for the exam and know the answers, we can’t seem to remember them. In sport this is often called “choking”.
If you feel that your pressure or stress levels are getting too much in an exam you can try to refocus and get “in the zone” again by finding a spot on the wall, breathing in deeply through your nose for a count of five, and then out for a count of five, focusing on that spot, and saying a word to yourself that will help you feel calm again – like “relax” “focus” or even “I can do it”.
-
Stuart Mourton answered on 15 Jun 2011:
I will just add a little bit to Helen’s answer, and this is more about pressure in sport rather than tests, but it’s the same principle really. An area that i’m looking at a little bit is called ‘Specifictity of prectice’ (bit of a mouthfull!!) this basically looks at whether practicing under conditions you are going to face in competition help your performance. When you are in the calss room going through a subject things are usually pretty laid back and there’s not much pressure on you. However when you are in a test situation you have lots of additional things to worry about, and the situation is very different (big hall, silence, time pressure etc etc) What we look at is whether if you were to learn the information in a similar environment to where and how you will have to perfrom later, does that help reduce any ‘choaking’ and drop in perforamnce. Obviously you can’t really have all your lessons in a big hall in silence, but in sport you can add in things like presure, time constraints and crowd noise to try and simulate competition. You will often hear mangers say it’s very hard to replicate the game environment in training but if you can, your players are going to be more used to it, and less likley to see a drop in performance come game day.
Comments