Book Description

The study evaluates the test-gain benefits of an accelerated desensitization and adaptive attitudes intervention for test-anxious students. College students were screened for high test anxiety. Twenty anxious students, half of them on academic probation, were assigned to an Intervention or to a minimal treatment Control group. The Intervention was a desensitization protocol which included stretch-tense, deep breath, release-relax, and positive suggestion sequences to expedite anxiety reduction and also positive adaptive attitudes associated to each of eight learning, review, and testing scenes. The intervention was presented via a 31 minute recording, which students reviewed an average of two times. Test gains were calculated from final tests and final grades after the intervention, minus the midterm scores from before the intervention. The Intervention group attained significant test gains over the Controls, with considerably stronger gains among academic probation students as compared to students in good standing. Test gains correlated positively to anxiety-reduction benefits. Methodological limitations warrant some caution in interpreting the findings, although the strength of the attained benefits do suggest that the accelerated desensitization does improve test scores for struggling students with high test anxiety. The use of the recorded intervention is seen to vastly reduce the amount of training and the number of professional hours required for an anxiety-reduction program. It seems reasonable to recommended that college retention programs for probation students screen for test anxiety and intervene with highly test-anxious students. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.) [A summary of this research was presented at the Annual Meetings of the American School Counselor Association (Orlando, Florida, June 27, 2005) and the American Psychological Association (Washington, DC, August 20, 2005).].