School Exams

School Exams
Many schools around the country have just finished “mid-term” exams. I’ve been reading an article about how the expectation of a positive reward causes the body to register “stress” and deal with it by faster heart beats and numerous other physiological symptoms. Just the expectation causes more stress reactions than when receiving the actual reward. For example, if I walk toward my dog’s empty bowl, she starts to jump and dance around. Even when I try to walk with it to the dog food bag, she’s dancing around me so that it is hard to get there. Then, when I put the full bowl down for her to eat, she looks at me with disappointment and may not even eat her food.
If the expectation of a pleasant reward initiates that much stress, imagine how much stress must be caused by expecting a negative reward. Do you remember the sensations that surged through your body when a teacher announced: Tomorrow we’ll have a test. Even more so when the dreaded “mid-term”, “final exams” or “oral exams” were announced?
Theoretically, if a student has done his/her homework, read the materials, and memorized some pertinent information, the expectation is to do well on the exam. There is, however, always the very real result that the exam grade will not live up to our expectations. And what if you fail the exam? Very definitely a negative reward.
While I do question the validity of local school exams, standardized test, and the like that require paper and pencil – whether they are teacher scored or machine scored – I wonder if these stress inducing situations don’t set the students up for future ill health and anxiety attacks.
Instead of making a huge thing out of exam time, I used to teach my students a variety of test taking techniques, so that when the mandatory exams came around, my students did not experience the stress of: Oh, no! Exams! Panic! Instead, they had tools to approach the situation with reasonable confidence that the reward would be a positive one.