For many students, an impending exam can induce powerful feelings of anxiety.
While a small degree of anxiety can compel a person to perform better on a given task, high levels of anxiety can cause people to “freeze up” in exam situations and hinder performance. Between 16 and 20 percent of students experience this kind of anxiety, according to the American Test Anxieties Association.
When Dr. Andrew Petzold, an assistant professor at the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR), heard his students say that they were experiencing feelings of anxiety and unpreparedness before long-form essay exams, he decided to find a way to help them.
He developed a strategy that he calls “Exam Roulette” to help his students prepare for written exams in which they are instructed to answer a series of essay questions.
“I had been giving students topic areas for them to study for a while and had often heard the feedback that students ‘studied for the wrong things’ or ‘froze-up when they saw the essays,’ ” he said. “I figured it might be beneficial for my students to know more of what I was looking for in my essays before having to answer them.”
So, with the intent to help his students feel more prepared before writing an essay test, he began to provide his students with a list of potential questions that could end up on the exam.
The class before the exam, students are allowed to ask clarification questions about the topics. Petzold will answer these questions to help guide their studies, but won’t provide any specific information that could be used in a response.
Then, comes a game of chance.
On the day of the exam, Petzold rolls a die to select which of the questions will end up on the exam. Each side of the die corresponds to a potential essay question. The sides that are rolled dictate the questions that will appear on the exam.
“When I rolled the die to choose the question, there was a bit of a carnival atmosphere — students were rooting for numbers, cheering when a specific number was rolled and booing when a different one was rolled,” he said. “It acted like a release before they had to start writing — it was kind of fun.”
Petzold recently presented a poster on Exam Roulette at the the American Physiological Society’s (APS) Institute on Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin.
Preliminary results suggest that the game, and the additional preparation for the exam, can help students feel more prepared and may help reduce essay-related anxiety.
“I’ve polled the students and am currently analyzing data to see how statistically significant the results are, but so far, the majority of students report that there is a reduction in anxiety related to the exam,” said Petzold. “Students seem to feel better prepared as well — which has been shown to correlate with exam-related anxiety in the past.”
He is comparing the positive feedback from his students with actual test scores to see if there is any hard evidence that the game actually improves students’ performance on essays.
He also plans to try the game with students in other disciplines at UMR.
“Either way, the results in relation to a reduction in self-reported anxiety associated with the exams is promising,” he said.
Petzold is currently preparing the project for publication.
