Student Anxiety

Study: Students who write about anxieties perform better on tests.
ABC World News (1/13, story 8, 0:20, Sawyer) reported, "And, what if you could cure your fears by writing them down? A new study found if students spend ten minutes listing their fears before a big exam, their scores increase 5% over time. Fearful students who do nothing saw their scores drop 12%. Doctors think writing down your fears makes them less mysterious, so your brain is less distracted."
The Los Angeles Times (1/14, Khan) reports University of Chicago researchers "performed a series of experiments to test their hypothesis." Initially, "they asked 20 college students to take a math test just to get a base-line score, and simply told them to do their best. Next, to raise the stakes, they told the students that they could receive a monetary award if they got a good grade." The Times says that "before beginning the main test, the researchers asked one group of students to spend 10 minutes writing down their feelings about the test, and the other group sat quietly for that time. Everyone then took the same exam." Notably, they "found that students who sat quietly did 12% worse than they had on the pre-test, and the ones who wrote about their anxieties improved their scores by 5%."
The Time (1/13, Park) "Healthland" blog reported the researchers speculate that "the benefits of writing" could be "related to the fact that when you worry, anxious thoughts occupy the working memory of the brain, thus crowding out other thoughts or knowledge relevant to the pressure-packed task at hand. Writing about the fear provides an outlet for these nerve-wracking thoughts, freeing up the working memory to concentrate on other things." The study was published in the journal Science. The Chicago Tribune (1/14, Malone) covers the story, as did the CNN (1/13, Landau) "The Chart" blog.