Every teacher knows how stressful exams can be for students. You’ve no doubt noticed the wide-eyes, pale faces, or be-nubbed fingernails of certain children who sit down for exams, especially those with big consequences.
Aside from being upsetting to witness, when your students are highly stressed, it affects their ability to think.2 They might struggle to remember important facts, think creatively, or focus on the problems in front of them. The consequences are lower scores – scores that don’t accurately reflect their capabilities.
But nerve-wracking as they may be, exams are an important part of education. Until educators come up with a more effective way to assess student ability, summative assessments are here to stay. So how do you effectively reduce your students’ stress levels so they can perform at their best?
There are many ways, and the ICAS competition is one of them.
How does ICAS help to prepare your students for exams?
As a low-stakes assessment designed for friendly competition, ICAS is a fortuitous way to give your students exam experience. They can sit down for the exams with the knowledge that there are no real consequences for low scores, but still get to experience the formal environment of an exam setting. They can encounter the intense silence of the room, possibly for the first time, with every student hushed and encouraged to fully focus on the questions in front of them. They can discover what it feels like to answer a certain number of questions within a limited timeframe; how that pressure feels in their bodies and minds as they breeze through the easy questions but muck through the toughest. They can learn how to focus for prolonged periods of time (especially useful for younger children), and the effort it takes to do so. They can watch in mild amusement as their teacher takes on the much-more-serious role of invigilator, plodding between desks with her hands behind her back and her eyes scanning the room.
Nothing prepares a student for this scary environment quite like being thrust into the middle of it. And because ICAS is an extra-curricular, low-stakes assessment that uses familiar real-world scenarios, the seriousness is knocked down drastically, which means students can experience the environment in a way that feels much safer. It should still feel kind of serious, but nothing like a school certificate exam, selective entry exam, or scholarship test. When it comes to taking high-stakes tests such as these, students who have had exam experience through ICAS or other practice methods (including RiSE+) will be more familiar with the intense environment, and familiarity means reduced anxiety, a greater sense of control, and stronger confidence. Students can predict the environment more accurately – what it looks like, feels like, and what they are expected to do – which can have a tremendous impact on their self-assurance. Just imagine if you were thrust into a scary environment for the first time without having had any experience, one in which your stress levels had an impact on your performance?
That’s why exam experience can be so valuable for students. In a review of selective education access in 2018, the Department of Education found that “high scores [on exams] can be achieved by correctly answering moderately difficult questions with great consistency – which can result from preparation and practice.”1 It’s stating the obvious – that practice makes perfect – but good to hear it validated from a government organisation nonetheless.
Using ICAS for NAPLAN preparation and higher-order thinking
The government-mandated NAPLAN exam is one important example of where practice can help children achieve better scores, and because our parent company Janison delivers NAPLAN to millions of students every year, it happens to be on the exact same platform as ICAS. So, when sitting ICAS, students not only have the opportunity to become more comfortable with the physical environment of an exam, they can also get comfortable with the digital environment. When sitting down at a computer to start NAPLAN, they should recognise the layout of the page instantly, and this familiarity can help to settle their nerves and boost their confidence. It’s one less thing to figure out!
There’s one final exam experience benefit for students who take ICAS: by doing so, they are practising (and also strengthening) their higher-order thinking skills. Aside from these skills being tested on certain types of high-stakes tests, they are the underlying foundation for students’ progress, allowing them to think critically, solve problems, analyse information, and perform a variety of other advanced skills that they’ll need throughout the rest of their education and beyond. ICAS questions are carefully designed to test and strengthen these crucial skills, and the experience that students get can carry over to other important exams.
With enough exam practice, as your students sit down for their high-stakes exams, you’ll hopefully be faced with a more optimistic scene. Eyes will no longer be wide but narrowed in focus, faces flush with concentration, fingernails intact, and the occasional triumphant smile as answers pop into heads. Your students can be as confident as possible under the demanding circumstances, which can make a genuine difference to the course of their lives.
- Bruce S. McEwen, 2017, Neurobiological and Systemic Effects of Chronic Stress, Chronic Stress
- 2018, Review of Selected Education Access, NSW Department of Education