Test anxiety is when a student excessively worries about doing well on a test. This can become a major hindrance on test performance and cause extreme nervousness and memory lapses. Allowing anxiety to take over the part of your brain where the Working Memory is located, is like letting an elephant into a very small room. It takes up all the space, and no real work can be done. Helping students to have less anxiety is to allow more space for actual thinking and doing.
One of the ways to lessen anxiety is to practice some relaxation techniques, like taking several deep breaths between questions, to help refocus the mind. Reminding themselves that they have practiced similar questions many times before and that they are well prepared will help build confidence and reduce anxiety.
Students can do the easy questions first, and come back to the more difficult ones, but it is important in a test that is machine scored, that the student not get the bubbled answers out of sync. This could cause errors in the grading, and a much lower score if the student gets the answers mixed up. It would be better for students to mark their test booklets for questions they want to go back to, and select an answer to fill in as they go along, to prevent that from happening. Then, the student can go back and recheck answers they are unsure about.
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