Test anxiety
PSCS Staff Meeting | 05/28/2008 | 4:00 – 6:00 pm | Attendees: Director,
Administrative Director, 3 Teaching Staff members, myself
The philosophical basis of PSCS does not support tests, standardized or others. No tests means no scores, no grades, no being held back. Students truly drive their education at this school.
Why no tests? Tests require students to meet external standards. At PSCS, it is believed that intrinsic motivation is more real and lasting than external motivations and standards. Tests also lead to anxiety, competition, cheating, all in all, bringing out some of the most painful emotions in students. Test anxiety is not a new phenomenon. It traces back to 2 B.C.E in China when they administered tests for entering civil service. PSCS wants no part of that.
That said, the world outside of PSCS is full of tests from getting your driver's license to going through college. So, how would one expect PSCS students to deal with tests? Most PSCS students fair well if not better than their "regular school" counterparts in most tests. I am not however talking about performance. What do tests do to the emotional make-up of a PSCS student? An experiment this week, provided the answer, at least for some students.
One of the staff members gave the most mild, the most PSCSish pop-quiz – no scores, no grades and students checked each other's work. Why was the test given? As a diagnostic so the staff member could get a sense of how much material the students had really retained and to give them a flavor of what they might experience in college should they decide to pursue the class topic in greater depth in the future, which some of them had started expressing an interest in doing.
It turned out that some of the students were quite anxious, with one even trying to cheat on the test (or so another said). This got me thinking — I would hope and predict that students who have been in the PSCS environment would treat tests a hoop to jump through but nothing to sweat over. Isn't that what should happen when tests are not valued? They are something to get through, that's all. I would also hope that PSCS students would be self-confident enough to not worry about what a test indicated of them as people. I am guessing that the students that were anxious were anxious because they were worried about their performance and how they would be perceived by others. We all worry about that to some degree or another. Adolescents worry about it more than others. So, this is nothing new. However, I realized that I was naive in assuming that having no tests would rid students of test anxiety. It doesn't. Okay, got that.
The question is how might we help our students not be anxious about tests, especially when they don't deal with them, like at PSCS but will need to at some point in their lives? How do we help them see tests as just hoops to jump through and not as measures of them as people? I think the answer lies in our culture. We are all worried about how we are perceived. That is where the anxiety comes from. Not from tests. Being concerned with perceptions starts early in life — our children are trained to be well-mannered and so 'different' when they are outside the home. They (we) dress to impress, we eat to impress, we buy to impress, we work to impress, we achieve to impress. Its everywhere. And, that is where it needs to be addressed .. in each of our actions that are done to impress.If we can start noticing when or how we do something to impress, perhaps that awareness will bring about a shift in us. And then, when we stop worrying about how we are perceived, we will not have test anxiety.
I will continue pondering this one …