Author: Sujata Gupta / Source: Science News
At a large Midwestern high school, almost 40 percent of low-income biology students were poised to fail the course.
Instead, thanks to simple measures aimed at reducing test anxiety, that failure rate was halved.Psychological interventions that improve grades could ultimately help keep more low-income students in the sciences, says Christopher Rozek, a psychologist at Stanford University and lead author of the study, which appears online the week of January 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Low-income students are much less likely than high-income students to complete four years of high school science. That leads to those students being less likely, or unable, to major in science and math in college or to pursue related — often lucrative — careers in adulthood. One of the many factors underlying this achievement gap is low-income students’ internalized feelings of inadequacy in such fields, Rozek says. Those feelings often translate to high pretest anxiety and worse grades.
In previous, smaller studies, researchers have shown that reducing performance anxiety can improve test scores. To scale up that work, Rozek and…
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