A few thoughts on this new Psych Science paper on test anxiety journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09… by @garvin_brod and colleagues. I love the conversation and want to bring up some alternative viewpoints and data to the discussion. /1 (1) Some research already shows that performance anxiety (like test or math anxiety) undermines test performance directly & also indirectly THROUGH studying behaviors, which partially mediate the effects of performance anxiety on test performance. Eg: psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-42… /2

We often assume math anxious people avoid math (eg elective math courses) but research on this topic is surprisingly thin! We recently uncovered that math anxious people avoid math WITHIN their math courses too in the form of their exam studying choices doi.org/10.1037/xge000… 1/ Here we show the proportion of study time students report allocating to various study strategies. Math anxious students report spending substantially less time on the most effective study strategy for math exams: practice problems! 2/

There are massive racial punishment disparities in school that are the result of structure, bias, and mistrust. This problem needs to be addressed from multiple perspectives, and we find substantial evidence that psychological interventions can help! 1/17 Additionally, punishments like suspensions give the message to students that they are not welcome and do not belong in school in the most direct way (by physically barring them from school). It is a strong threat to school belonging. 2/17 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Interested in MATH ANXIETY? We know math anxiety undermines academic performance, but how does it affect students' choices? We developed a novel behavioral task to capture a behavioral signature of math anxiety: MATH AVOIDANCE. advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/11/e… 1/17 Why care about math anxiety? International surveys of students show that ~30% of students report being math anxious and that math anxiety is linked with poor performance worldwide, even for students performing above the 90th percentile in math. 2/17

Have you ever felt like you didn’t fit in or belong at school? Many middle school students feel this way, so we tested an intervention designed to increase middle schoolers’ sense of belonging, and it worked! Read about our findings in PNAS: pnas.org/content/early/… 1/18 To help students deal with their belonging concerns, we conducted a randomized control trial to test whether an intervention to increase student belonging would help students who were just making the transition to middle school. 2/18