Johnson 2017
Zodi Johnson
11/13/17
Learning Challenge Solution
There have been countless instances where no matter how much I study a subject or feel like I
understand the material I always end up having an anxiety attack as soon as I start trying to apply that
information when taking a test. My palms start to sweat, and my heart will start racing. Eventually, I'll
start to feel helpless and lose focus and then it feels like I don't remember any of the material that I
studied. After much consideration, I chose test anxiety for my Learning Challenge Solution because I
felt like there were not many solutions for this issue and I wanted to find the best solutions so I could
help others who have the same problem as I do. Testing anxiety affects the people who deal with it in
different ways although the solutions can be implemented and be useful for everyone. After doing quite
a bit of research to find different solutions for testing anxiety, I found two major factors that repeated in
the several articles that I read and that was not being completely prepared for the test and the effects of
emotional dysregulation (Hartman, 2017). The first factor I mentioned seemed like the most plausible
factor to cause test anxiety because everybody can relate to being asked a question that they don't know
the answer to but after doing research I concluded that the main influence of my testing anxiety comes
from my regulation of emotions. According to the textbook Motivation and Learning Strategies For
College Success: A Focus on Self-Regulated Learning by Myron Dembo and Helena Seli there are
eight irrational thinking patterns that influence an individuals' emotions and for my research I needed to
identify which irrational thinking patterns that I suffer from so I could change the way I think (Dembo
& Seli, 2016). For this project, I tried to find solutions for both test preparation and the regulation of
emotions to help with my overall test anxiety and what I found were a wide display of different
solutions, but I chose to focus on three of them in hopes that I would see results within three weeks.
The three solutions that I chose were:
Johnson 2017
1. Developing my test taking skills which also included learning more about test preparation
2. Regulating my emotional state before and after tests
3. Practicing relaxation techniques and staying healthy(eating healthy and getting enough sleep,
etc.)
Methodology
What exactly is testing anxiety? According to the textbook I mentioned earlier, it is, "a specific form
of anxiety related to the evaluation of academic ability" (Dembo & Seli, 2016). When I first started
researching my topic, I was more focused on finding out what causes testing anxiety rather than the
solutions to fix it, so I went to GALILEO and looked for scholarly articles relating to testing anxiety.
What I came across helped me immensely because what I found was multiple articles about the causes
of testing anxiety but not much about solutions to ...
