ATTEMPTING TO RESCUE THE EFFECTS OF TEST ANXIETY USING INTENTIONAL MIND WANDERING

Abstract

Test anxiety is a phenomenon that many university students suffer from. Yet, even with the development of current solutions such as expressive writing and therapeutic techniques, limitations like scalability and inapplicability for some personalities makes it important to look for alternative solutions to remedy these gaps in current interventions. As such, this study proposes to mitigate these negative effects by using Intentional Mind Wandering (IMW) to target the key models – Distraction theories and Disjunctive Motivational Models underlying test anxiety. Following, our overarching hypothesis is that IMW would improve test performance. Additionally, IMW content was also manipulated to study its effects on test performance and we hypothesised that self-efficacious IMW content would lead to better test performance compared to neutral IMW content. To test these hypotheses, the study utilised task scores as a measure of test performance. However, despite what we hypothesised, our results were insignificant and we there were no observable differences between the effects of self-efficacious and neutral IMW content on test performance. Further, there was no significant changes in test performance overall despite IMW intervention. Overall, the results of this study neither supports our hypothesis nor current evidence in the field.