《经济学人》:考试焦虑如何影响考试成绩?
- 2026-01-26 07:14:36
原文标题 :
Exam nerves’ real cause
High anxiety
Anxious exam candidates’ problem is the run-up, not the main event
Anxiety does not cause bad results in exams
[Paragraph 1]EXAMS ARE nerve-racking, especially for those already of an anxious disposition. The silence of the hall; the ticking of the clock; the beady eye of the invigilator; the smug expression of the person sitting at the neighbouring desk who has finished 15 minutes early. It therefore seems hardly surprising that those who worry about taking tests do systematically worse than those who do not. What is, perhaps, surprising, according to research published recently in Psychological Science by Maria Theobald at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and her colleagues, is that it is not the pressure of the exam hall which causes the problem. It is the pressure of revision.
[Paragraph 2]Dr Theobald theorised that if anxiety was truly interfering with a student’s ability to transfer known information from brain to paper via pen, then those with high levels of it would perform worse in a real exam, when it actually mattered, than in either a mock beforehand or during online practice sessions. Moreover, she expected this performance-drop to correlate with levels of self-reported exam nerves.
[Paragraph 3]She therefore worked with 309 German medical students who were preparing for their final state exam, the most important that they take. This test consists of 230 questions split into three five-hour sessions over three days.
[Paragraph 4]During the 100 days before the actual papers, all her volunteers used a digital-learning platform which presented them with old exam questions and logged their performance. They also sat a mock examination, clearly presented to them as such, 40 days before the real thing. To assess their levels of anxiety, they were asked, every day for 40 days in the run up to the real exam and also on the day of that exam, to respond on a five-point scale to statements like, “I feel tense and nervous”. On the day of the mock they were similarly asked to rate statements like, “I worry whether I have studied enough”.
[Paragraph 5]What Dr Theobald found was not what she expected. Anxiety on the day of the test did not predict exam performance at all. What did predict it was the level of knowledge a student displayed in the mock exam and the earlier digital-learning activities. Those who performed well in these also did well in the real thing, regardless of how anxious they were on the day.
[Paragraph 6]What actually hampered students, it turned out, were high levels of anxiety during the weeks before the exam took place. The greater a student’s anxiety in the days before the exam, the lower his or her knowledge-gain was during that period, leaving that student with less material to regurgitate during the exam itself.
[Paragraph 7]And this, paradoxically, is a positive discovery, for it suggests a change of approach to revision by the anxious might help improve their results. Dr Theobald notes that test-anxiety is at its worst when students have low expectations of success and simultaneously know that passing the exam is exceedingly important. To reduce this anxiety, she proposes a two-fold strategy for students to consider as they revise. First, they can raise their belief in their own abilities by reminding themselves of just how much they know. Second, they can diminish the significance of the test by reminding themselves that, while it is important, it is not a life or death situation. It really isn’t. Really…
（恭喜读完，本篇英语词汇量594左右）
原文出自：2022年11月5日《TE》Science & technology版块
【全文翻译】
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The silence of the hall; the ticking of the clock; the beady eye of the invigilator; the smug expression of the person sitting at the neighbouring desk who has finished 15 minutes early.
考场的寂静；时钟的滴答声；监考老师的机警眼神；邻座考生提前15分钟交卷的得意表情。
Those who performed well in these also did well in the real thing, regardless of how anxious they were on the day.
在前期练习中的成绩优异者，他们在正式考试中也成绩优异，与他们当天的焦虑程度无关。
What actually hampered students, it turned out, were high levels of anxiety during the weeks before the exam took place.
事实证明，真正影响学生成绩的是考试前几周的高度焦虑。
*run-up[ˈrʌn ʌp]a period of time leading up to an important event; the preparation for this.
n. 前期，预备阶段，准备阶段eg.Supermarkets everywhere reported excellent trading in the run-up to Christmas.各地超级市场报告说圣诞节前生意火爆。
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【重点词根】（1+4个）
regurgitate=re-回，反 + gurg-喉 + -it + -ate,表动词=>回流
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