Addressing Test Anxiety in a High-Stakes Environment: Strategies for Classrooms and Schools

"This fascinating, well-researched book makes a wonderful contribution to the field. It provides helpful information on what test anxiety is and what we can do about it. This topic is as important today than ever due to education reform initiatives across the country."
-James Kelleher, Assistant Superintendent
Scituate Public Schools, MA

"The book offers answers to the most important question of all: If test anxiety can hinder our ability to make accurate inferences and good decisions for kids, what can we do to ease students′ fears? As it turns out, researchers have answers, and the authors present helpful ideas for all of us-parents, educators, and students themselves."
-Linda Wacyk, Trustee
Grand Ledge Board of Education, MT

What can we do about test anxiety that will help our students?

Testing is expanding at every level of education and into every corner of social and vocational enterprise, and test anxiety can have devastating effects on students′ test scores, confidence, and motivation to learn. Testing has become more extensive and more consequential at every level. The higher the stakes on tests, the greater the concern about the presence and effects of test anxiety.

Addressing Test Anxiety in a High-Stakes Environment provides straightforward explanations, practical suggestions, and reasonable recommendations for addressing test anxiety. This practical resource offers:

• An overview of the concept of test anxiety
• A glossary of assessment and measurement terms
• Current research findings on test anxiety and which students it is most likely to affect
• Information on the prevalence, correlations, and effects of test anxiety
• Situations in which test anxiety can be helpful
• Suggestions for preventing and reducing the effects of test anxiety

Gregory J. Cizek is Professor of Educational Measurement at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His background in the field of educa­tional assessment includes five years as a manager of licensure and certification testing programs for American College Testing (ACT) in Iowa City, Iowa, and 15 years of teaching experience at the col­lege level, where his teaching assignments have consisted primarily of graduate courses in educational testing, research methods, and statistics. He is the author of over 200 books, chapters, articles, conference papers, and reports. His books include Handbook of Educational Policy (Academic Press, 1998); Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect It, and Prevent It (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999); Setting Performance Standards: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001); and Detecting and Preventing Classroom Cheating (Corwin Press, 2003). Dr. Cizek has served as an elected member and vice president of a local school board in Ohio, and he currently works with several states, organizations, and the U.S. Department of Education on tech­nical and policy issues related to large-scale standards-based testing programs for students in grades K–12. He began his career as an ele­mentary school teacher in Michigan, where he taught second and fourth grades.

Samantha S. Burg is a doctoral student in Educa­tional Psychology, Measurement, and Evaluation at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She holds a BS degree in engineering from the University of Oklahoma and an MA degree in mathematics education from the University of Georgia. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, she worked in the field of petroleum engineering in Alaska, served as a youth minister in Scotland, and taught high school mathematics in Georgia. Most recently, she has worked as a test development specialist for the state testing program in North Carolina. Ms. Burg first became interested in test anxiety when she was a student teacher and her class refused to take a test; this interest has persisted throughout her doctoral research, some of which examines the ways in which test anxiety may be transmitted in classrooms. Currently, she is a research assistant on a mathematics education pro­ject and is very much interested in completing her doctoral work soon, in order to support her tennis-ball-obsessed dog, Spencer, in the fashion to which he has become accustomed. Ms. Burg has presented her research at various professional conferences and is a member of the National Council on Measurement in Education.