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Let’s face it: A lot of students have test anxiety. How do we change test-taking so that we’re creating a comfortable environment for our students to show what they really know? A strategy called Test Talk, which my late co-teacher Diana Herrington and I created, has helped my students relax during exams. Our students are pre-service elementary school teachers, but since I wrote about this strategy on Twitter several months ago, teachers around the country have let me know how they have used this with their K–12 students (and in subjects other than math).
Four years ago, Diana and I decided to dedicate the first five minutes of the testing period to having our students look over the test and talk about strategies to solve the problems. We would have them put their pencils on the ground so they could focus on having a conversation. Our students were grouped in fours, and they would talk within their group, but I’ve seen videos from other teachers trying this where their elementary students walk around so they can talk to any other student, and I now follow suit.
The purpose of this was twofold: First, we wanted to test the way we taught—students collaborated a lot in our class, so we decided to include some collaboration during the test. And second, we realized that a lot of our students had both math anxiety and testing anxiety.
