Test-Anxiety Program and Test Gains with Nursing Classes

Nursing programs can be highly stressful, and nursing students have been found to be more test-anxious than other students. The present investigation examines a practical program to reduce test-anxiety impairment and improve academic performance for a significant number of highly anxious nursing students. Incoming nursing students were screened using the Westside Test Anxiety scale, and half (42 of 84) were identified as having highor moderately-high anxiety and were randomly assigned to an "active control" Treatment or an information Control group. Students in both groups were introduced to their material and encouraged to review it. Students took the comprehensive Evolve/HESI exit exam in the early spring. The Treatment group showed a significant 12+ percentile gain over the Control group on the HESI (p<.05), and a 9 percentile gain over the Controls on their spring GPAs The active control treatment protocol used here is seen to provide a cost-effective intervention to improve test performance. Circumstances permitting, the authors recommend that nursing programs include provisions for highly anxious students. Test-Anxiety Program and Test Gains 2 Approximately 16%—20% of students are found to have high test anxiety, according to various studies (cf. Ergene, 2003), and a Canadian survey finds that adolescents worry about tests and schoolwork more than about any other aspect of their lives (McGuire et al. 1987). Nursing students are found to be even more test anxious than are students in other fields. Nursing students face the same pressures as other students, and in addition many are also under the impression that an inadvertent mistake might seriously harm a patient as well jeopardize their own careers. Surveys of some 600 nursing students in two separate colleges identified just over 35% with high test anxiety (Driscoll et al., 2009; Wheeler, 2010). Highly test-anxious students are found to score about 12 percentile points below their low anxiety counterparts (Cassady & Johnson, 2002; Hembree, 1988; McDonald, 2001), and the anxiety itself is thought to be a major contributing factor (cf. Lee, 1999). The current study is to assess the feasibility and benefits of a broadly implemented test-anxiety treatment program.