January 2018
Test anxiety and the fear of failure is something that every student goes through. I believe that the way the school system has been structured (as far as my education experience), we tend to do everything possible to avoid failure. And when we encounter failure, we start to panic.
During my freshman year of college, I took a general physics course. I ended up with a B, but I remember that the first few exams were extremely difficult for me. During the test, I would hit a ‘mental roadblock’ and could not for the life of me think of how to approach the problem. I would constantly be thinking, “What is going on? Why am I forgetting this now?”
According to Make it Stick by Peter Brown, this anxiety took away from my working memory capacity. Going forward, I began to look at mistakes through a reflective lens. I learned to use it as a tool to focus on the concepts that I needed to spend more time understanding. While taking organic chemistry, I was utilizing more self-assessment as a means of retrieval, reflection, and reconsolidation. When you practice in this way, you learn to “view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the road rather than as a measure of inability and the end of a road” (92). When you embrace your failures and learn from it, you are making learning an exploratory process and making it a meaningful experience.
~ Aladdin Roque-Dangaran