Mariana Bockarova, PhD :
Testing situations provide ample reason for students to feel anxious: an uncertain outcome, an environment which values intellectual ability, belonging to a society in which degrees and grade point averages are accepted markers of intelligence and a base point for graduate school acceptances and job offers.
As the larger capitalist system can be understood to function this way, the assumption of testing situations being accurate markers of both intelligence and efficiency is reinforced, thus test anxiety can be understood, in a Foucaudian sense, discursively as a consequence of this overarching assumption and future results. Therefore in testing, much more is at stake to students than merely a grade.
This may be why,
during examinations, individuals high in test anxiety are more likely to experience frequent and intense elevations in anxiety as an emotional state, greater activation of the autonomic nervous system, and more self-centered worry and task-irrelevant thoughts that interfere with attention and performance.
The importance of exploring student anxiety, not only from a medical perspective but also a psychological one, is therefore great, as test anxiety is shown not only to decrease performance but also to help promote negative behaviors including cheating on tests and feigning illness in order to be absent on testing days. Thus, this calls into question whether current evaluation practices are, in fact, at all valid if one’s anxiety is affecting one’s ability to demonstrate knowledge.
Terminology: Stress vs. Anxiety
Defined as “a future-oriented mood state in which one is ready or prepared to attempt to cope with upcoming negative events”, the term “anxiety” has been well documented as the term used to capture the effect felt immediately before taking a test or examination.
Nevertheless, the demarcation between the terms “anxiety” and “stress,” as related both generally and to professional performance (within academia and in the industry), is extremely ill-defined and thus used interchangeably in the literature.
As noted by McMillan (2008):
The pathways for stress mechanisms and anxiety overlap extensively… CRF elicits a number of responses normally regarded as associated with both anxiety and stress…. [Thus] it is difficult to view stress distinct from the associated emotional states when those states are fear or anxiety… this may be the reason that in everyday discourse, the connotation of stress is most readily equated to anxiety-type emotional states.
Both stress and anxiety similarly consider that effects are pronounced in three domains – emotional, physiological, and behavioral changes (Cohen et al., 2007), much like those reported for test-taking anxiety.
However, stress can generally be thought of as the process taken to respond to an immediate stressor. At the same time, anxiety describes the feeling of ease and worry when a stressor is not always clear.
(Mariana Bockarova, PhD is a researcher at the University of Toronto).
