Members in the Media
From: The New York Times

How to Be a Better Test-Taker

The New York Times:

THE REALITY

Many capable, hard-working students perform poorly on exams because they’ve overtaxed their “working memory” — the mental scratchpad on which we combine information from our long-term memory with the specifics of the problem in front of us, in the service of finding a solution.

THE PROBLEM

“When students are anxious about how they’ll do on an exam,” says Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, “their worries use up some of their working memory capacity, leaving less of this cognitive horsepower to apply to the task at hand.”

HOW TO

Dr. Beilock, the author of “Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To,” offers two interventions that can free up working memory in students caught in the grip of test anxiety.

Read the whole story: The New York Times

See Sian Beilock at the 24th APS Annual Convention

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