Exams and Academic Achievement Anxiety in Children and How to Deal With It
I had an exchange with a mother who was angry, sad, and frustrated because of what was happening to her daughter every time she went for an exam.
The child's low grades contradict what the mother said, as the mother used to tell me about her daughter's clearly evident excellent abilities in reading, writing, mathematics, and languages while preparing her for the exams.
The mother was so confident that her daughter would score a high grade whenever she had an exam. However, what used to happen every time was that the child would return home with tear-soaked cheeks, low grades, and unparalleled frustration that made exams, according to her, a traumatic experience.
What happened with the child could have happened with you, your friend, a family member, or anyone you know. It is what the specialists call Exams and Academic Achievement Anxiety. This type of overwhelming anxiety can prevent you from recalling anything that you have studied when you're in the exam hall. If you're interested in knowing more about this type of anxiety, please read our article.
What is meant by exam and academic achievement anxiety?
Exam and academic achievement anxiety is defined as an emotional state associated with tension and fear that afflicts a person at different stages of their life, and it is related to the evaluation, testing, and exam process.
For this, the examined person may show many signs that reflect their anxiety. However, the danger of exam and academic achievement anxiety lies in its advanced stages as the positive effect of stress and anxiety as motivators toward exerting more effort in order to succeed academically stops.
Here, its negative effect begins to emerge, and the anxiety levels multiply and reach abnormal stages that prevent the student from being calm and focused before or during the exam or the assessment.
Specialists and psychologists have talked about a strong relationship linking the learning process to the phenomenon of anxiety. The research and studies they carried out on a group of students stated that a significant percentage of them showed a significant decrease in ability level during the exam evaluation.
However, they attributed this to conditions and situations that elicit psychological pressure and tension when going through the exam process; as a result, signs of stress and disorder manifest in them, forming what is known as exam anxiety.
Children, in light of their low emotional intelligence capabilities in the early stages, are highly susceptible to exam and academic achievement anxiety, and this explains their extreme anxiety and tension during exams despite being well prepared for them.
Unfortunately, this prevents them from recalling the answers to some questions, although they already know them. Exam anxiety also makes them lose the ability to focus and causes them to be forgetful and distracted.
Accordingly, the concept of exam anxiety and academic achievement in children can be defined as a state of anxiety about the test that the child is undergoing or will undergo, and it is a nervous feeling that some children feel at the beginning or before the tests. It is worth noting that feeling a little stress and anxiety before exams is normal.
However, the strong symptoms of anxiety that are triggered by exams, which are the lack of focus in the exam that affects your performance during it and the accompanying physical symptoms, such as stomach pain, headache, sweating, and trembling are not normal. In some cases, severe exam anxiety causes the student to faint or vomit.
What causes exam and academic achievement anxiety?
There are many causes for exam and academic achievement anxiety in children. Generally speaking, they are a group of intellectual stimuli that generate a negative reaction to expected negative events.
Both the mind and the body are affected by this, and it leads to the secretion of the hormone adrenaline, which in turn causes many physical symptoms, such as rapid heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and sweating. All of this happens because the children focus their attention on negative events that may happen during or after the exam or on similar negative past experiences.
In the case of exam and academic achievement anxiety, plenty of negative thoughts roam the child's head. For example, what if I can't remember anything during the exam? Is it possible to fail despite all that fatigue? What if the questions didn’t come out the way I expected and the test heavily relied on deductive questions and previous information? If I don’t get a perfect score, I will no longer be an A-list student. My parents will be very angry.
Such thoughts and others that come to the mind of the child because of the test stimulate feelings of intense anxiety and are in fact the main causes of exam and academic achievement anxiety. The more the child focuses on these possible negative events, the more their exam anxiety will increase, and then they will be distracted, which, in turn, affects their performance badly.
The symptoms of exam and academic achievement anxiety
Below is a group of exam and academic achievement anxiety in children symptoms, which are a group of indications that point out that the child is negatively anxious about the test. The most prominent of these are:
- Negative and obsessive thoughts dominate the child's mind during the test or during the preparation period, causing the child insomnia, sleep problems, and stress.
- Performance disorder related to mental processes, such as thinking, remembering, and focusing.
- Exam anxiety in children's symptoms appear physiologically in the form of abdominal pain, shortness of breath, profuse sweating, rapid heartbeat, and dry lips and throat.
- Symptoms of exam anxiety appear in the form of difficulty in remembering information during tests, distraction, and decreased ability to focus during the test and in various educational situations.
How to treat exam and academic achievement anxiety
Exam anxiety in children is a state of psychological disorder that can be controlled and monitored. You can treat it by taking the following measures:
1. Sleep well
Good sleep is one of the most important methods of treating exam and academic achievement anxiety in children.
Making sure that your child sleeps well before the test is one of the responsibilities that must be ensured by parents because exam anxiety pushes the child to study when they are supposed to sleep, as this increases their anxiety and tires their nervous system, and reduces their focus and ability to remember.
Therefore, it must be emphasized that the child sleeps for sufficient hours before the test, and ensure allowing them to eat a good and healthy breakfast rich in protein and vitamins before going to the test.
2. Communicate with the child
Communicating with the child and listening to them is one of the effective and available methods for treating exam anxiety in children at any time. It is possible to talk to the child and allow them to express their fears and thoughts and to provide comfortable and reassuring answers to the questions and negative thoughts that revolve in their mind.
This calm and warm dialogue with the child would make things easier and clearer to them that their exam fears are normal and happen even with adults when taking fateful steps in their lives. Also, it is possible to monitor the child in an attempt to relieve their tensions, such as by performing deep breathing exercises.
3. Enhancing the child's self-confidence
Enhancing the child's self-confidence and clarifying the concept of exams helps to treat exam anxiety in children. The child must be made aware that the purpose of the exam is learning in and of itself, memorizing and understanding information, and not obtaining full grades, and this would reduce the burden and psychological pressure on the child. In addition, their grades don’t determine their intelligence and aren’t a criterion of differentiation between them and their colleagues.
4. Studying with the child
Sitting with the child while studying to read a book or to help them may be an effective way to treat their exam anxiety. Moreover, it is the parent's responsibility to take this moral stand with their children in these crucial and highly sensitive moments although parents should ask their children if they need any study-related help, support, or even attention and motivation while preparing for exams.
5. Reducing the psychological burden on the child
Underestimating the subject of the exam is one of the methods of treating exam and academic achievement anxiety in children. Unfortunately, most parents are considered the main cause of their children's exam anxiety because they place high hopes on their children and convince them that their happiness or sadness is dependent on their degrees.
This would increase the psychological burden on the child, as it holds them responsible for the feelings of their family, thus increasing their anxiety about exams.
In Conclusion
Exam and academic achievement anxiety in children and adults is a natural thing as long as it doesn’t exceed its normal levels that function as a positive motivation that pushes the person to strive and work hard.
However, if it exceeds its normal limits and turns into a neurological condition that is psychologically and physically harmful, then it must be monitored and eliminated immediately in order to get rid of it and its negative effects.