Anxiety's Hidden Cost
Posted on: Thursday, 25 June 2009, 07:15 CDT
New research on the effects of anxiety on academic performance has clear practical applications in the classroom. The effect of anxiety on academic performance is not always obvious, but research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the U.K. suggests that students may suffer serious hidden costs.
The researchers, Professor Michael Eysenck and Dr. Nazanin Derkshan, designed a series of experiments to explore the effects of anxiety on students’ ability to perform tasks such as avoiding distractions on a computer screen, reading a story, or solving a series of simple mathematical problems. Professor Eysenck is quoted as saying, "A lot of the negative effects of anxiety appear to be caused by difficulties with controlling attention. This suggests that training techniques designed to enhance attentional control -- the ability to ignore distractions and to switch attention from one task to another -- could help anxious students to achieve their academic potential."
The study showed anxious individuals often perform at a comparable level to non-anxious ones, but do so at greater cost in terms of long-term stress. "This shows that it is important that teachers focus not only on whether a student's academic performance seems to be okay, but also on how much effort the student had to put in to achieve that level,” said Professor Eysenck. “Anxious students may be trying desperately hard just to keep up and this could be at great psychological cost."
In one experiment, participants' eye movements were recorded as they read a story that included a few 'distracter' words that were unrelated to the story. Researchers found anxious participants took longer to read the story because they tended to dwell on the irrelevant words, particularly when they thought that others would evaluate their comprehension.
In another experiment, participants performed two arithmetical tasks such as multiplication and division, either in separate blocks (all the problems requiring multiplication grouped together and kept separate from the division problems) or with one task alternating with the other. In this experiment, anxiety levels did not appear to affect the number of correct answers, but anxious participants took longer to complete the task, particularly when they had to keep switching from one type of mathematical calculation to another.
Overall, the experiments showed anxiety had more effect on how much effort it took to perform a task than on how well the task was actually performed, demonstrating that anxiety can produce "hidden costs" that are not apparent in performance.
SOURCE: Economic and Social Research Council, U.K., June 23, 2009
Source: Ivanhoe
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