So, what's going on? While it's entirely possible that a small number of students are careless or lazy, most genuinely want to do well in their exams so there must me something else happening. It turns out that there's a wealth of research on under-performance under pressure in areas as diverse as playing golf, landing airplanes and of course the old reliable stressor - taking a maths exam. All of this work points not to incompetence, but to limitations in the way our brain is wired. It's all about something called working memory and the good news is there's something we can do about it.

This workshop is NOT about reducing stress or anxiety. That's an issue for another day, instead we look at how to cope despite the stress or anxiety we feel in an exam situation. Being stressed in an exam situation is being human. Indeed, a small bit of stress can actually be a good thing in an exam. While lots of people find exams very tough, there's a consistent minority who use the additional stress to exceed their normal performance.  

Working memory

Try this quick test that Sian Beilock describes in her book Choke. I'm going to give you a sentence and a letter. Decide whether the sentence makes sense and remember the letter. 

• On warm sunny afternoons, I like to walk in the woods. F

• The farmer drove the grape to the sleeping bear. E

• The ranger saw the eagle in the sky. R

• The man thought the light was a nice after dinner train. R

• After work, the woman always goes home for lunch. B

When this test is carried out, the participant sees each line on a computer screen and then it disappears. Whether the sentence is true or not is a red herring, what we're interested in is your ability to remember the letters. As you move through the sentences this gets harder. Your working memory is what you use to hold information in your short term memory and act on it. The problem is that we have a surprisingly limited amount of it. As you got to the end of the sentences above you were holding 4 letters in your short term memory, the meaning of the final sentence and then trying to make a decision whether it was true. Not a lot but challenging for most people. How many adults out there have to turn off the radio or stop talking when they need to reverse into a parking space? Same thing.

There's a lot of research into how much working memory we have and how it varies between people.  This isn't ongoing and there are no absolute answers but we can do a lot with two general assumptions which are pretty accurate. 

• Most people can hold about 7 chunks of information in their working memory 

• Most people can process information in up to 3 of those chunks at one time

(The word 'chunk' might seem strange but it's very important and we'll get to it later)

While there are isolated reports of people being able to hold up to 14 chunks of information, that's very rare and even still its pretty restricted. Interestingly, people with higher working memory can get impacted more severely in an exam situation.

So what happens in an exam?

I was always pretty good at maths but during secondary school I noticed something strange. I couldn't add correctly in a maths exam. I was great at algebra and calculus and so on, but when looking at my papers afterwards I would see things like 2 + 3 = 6. I shrugged it off and just resolved to use a calculator in the future, however, it's the kind of mistake I see again and again as a teacher marking exams. 

Well, the real question is what happens to your working memory in an exam?

A fun way to experiment on this is with maths exams because most people find them stressful and they're easy to mark. Beilock did an interesting experiment with a mixed group american students taking a maths test, she took half of the girls aside and told them that women are far outnumbered by men on maths courses and that there's lots of evidence that men score higher on maths exams. Sure enough, the girls she talked to did significantly worse on the exam. If you're a teacher reading this, it's a very repeatable experiment - just split a the room into girls on one side and boys on the other (to make people conscious of their gender), throw in a little stereotyping and run a maths quiz. This is known as stereotype threat. Before the feminists out there start to organise and hunt me down, the interesting thing is it doesn't matter whether you believe the stereotype or whether it's true at all. Once you're aware that others might believe it, then you are potentially distracted trying to prove them wrong.

So what happened? When they interviewed the girls afterwards they reported worrying. They were saying things in their heads like 'don't screw up', 'arh, I hate maths', 'I've got to prove the boys wrong!'. Our brain pays a lot of attention to these emotional worries and they get brought right into our working memory. The problem is that we then don't have as much available for the maths test and our performance suffers. If I had reduced my working memory  in the example earlier, I could remember 2, 3 but had to guess whether it was an addition or multiplication problem and ended up with 2 + 3 = 6. It all happens unconsciously so I ended up surprised when I get my results.

There's lots of other ways to introduce these trains of thought in your head. The example above works with any good stereotype, black people can be induced to underperform in mixed groups and white guys can when there are Asian students in the room.  You also might be worried about what your parents will think or what impact a high stakes test will have on your college entry. All of this reduces your working memory. If you have more working memory to start with, then you're more used to relying on it so it may actually hit you harder than students with lower working memory who have are used to working around their limitations.

There are other problems that occur with reduced working memory, we do a classic experiment to understand this which unfortunately will be ruined if I describe it here!  

So what can be done?

There are four things we can do to address under-performance in a stressful situation, some easy some more complicated. All help.

1. Manage the stress levels by simple relaxation techniques like breathing and by reinterpreting the stress reactions. Some stress is good!

2. Outsource thinking tasks

3. Change the size of your chunks

4. Be aware that all this stuff happens

1 - Managing stress levels

As described, a simple technique of breathing in for 7 and out for 11 can bring your stress levels down a notch. Try it. It won't remove all the stress but it might make it manageable.  If you want to go further, mindfulness is fantastic, however, despite having read several books on the topic, a mother who did a PhD in Mindfulness and a father who writes about it in the national press - I still don't practice myself. It's not that I don't believe in it.....it's just something I haven't gotten around to. So, to avoid preaching what I don't practice, I take another approach and  look at what that stress might mean by looking at a classic psychological experiment on the Capilano River Bridge. Unfortunately I can't go into further detail without spoiling the fun! 

​Being stressed in an exam is normal and some stress is good. Don't freak out because you're stressed, it's just being human.

2 - Outsourcing thinking tasks

So your working memory is reduced, they use something else to solve the problem.  Fortunately this is pretty easy. In my example above where I added 2 and 3 to get 6, all I needed to do was use a calculator or write it down. It turns out this is true for loads of problems.  You might index points in Technical Graphics, you might highlight key parts of the question you might use rough work to sketch out an outline of a story. These are really simple techniques that are hugely effective. You may not need them when working at your desk at home but exams are different, be smart about it and use them.

3 - Change the size of your chunks

Earlier I used the word 'chunk' instead of 'number' or 'fact' when describing how many things your mind can hold in its working memory. The reason for this is very important because the amount of information that is held in a chunk can vary massively. This is one of the key things that distinguishes experts from novices in any field.