SHOW NOTES

One common cause of exam stress is the 'fear of the unknown'.

Not knowing what topics will come up.
Not knowing what questions will be asked.
Having to prepare for something unseen.

Although a moderate level of stress is healthy - and even beneficial... see the previous episode! - if you're looking to reduce your teen's stress level, addressing the root causes of this 'fear of the unknown' might be a way to do that.


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TRANSCRIPT
 

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode number 74 - combatting ONE of the causes of exam stress: the fear of the unknown. The anxiety and worry around not knowing what topics will actually come up, what questions they’ll ask, and the overall issue of having to prepare for something unseen. 

Hello my Very Important Parents - and when I say ‘parents’, I’m including anyone in a parenting role. You’re all VIP in the Rock Solid Study world, and if you’re a new listener to the podcast a special welcome to you! And if you’ve been following for a while now, that’s awesome, I’m so glad you’re here and appreciate you listening in each week!

Now, today is kind of part two of a three-episode exam focus I’m delivering on the podcast right now, as here in Australia we’re deep in exam season right now.  But wherever you are, or whenever you’re listening to this, this episode will be really helpful in terms of finding ways to optimise your teen’s stress levels - for exams or other aspects of their study.

In last week’s episode, I shared my personal opinions around exam stress and the fact that actually some stress is not only normal, when it is in the moderate range, it’s actually helpful and even beneficial when it comes to exam performance.  And stress can come from a variety of sources or is created by a variety of issues that exams bring.

Number 1 - is the pressure of exams. The exam environment, the intensity, and the pressure of having to perform on demand and what I call pathway pressure: potentially having your teen’s next steps ride on their results. They might want or need certain results or grades and although we can yes, assure them that there are many pathways into careers these days, they likely want to take the most direct path, or they might want to go after a certain achievement like dux of their year, or even just want a particular result in a subject, just because they want it. And as long as they aren’t directly aligning their self worth with these goals, as long as they are going after these things in a healthy way, I think that push and challenge and yes, even some added pressure can be a positive thing (even if it doesn’t feel positive in a ‘happy kind of way’ in the moment) for many of us.

And yes, this will bring some degree of stress and anxiety.  But that stress can actually raise our performance. And so, given that with that one cause of stress - the pressure - from the exam environment, from pathway pressure or self-set goals, - there’s not a lot we can change these things (aside from, like I said, knowing that there is always an alternative pathway to a course or career) let’s consider the other two overarching causes of stress as, in my opinion, they are much more controllable. I won’t say EASY to control, because they require skills to do so, but they are controllable. And given that there will be pressure and stress no matter what for many students, these next two are ones that we may well want to reduce so that your teen can stay in that optimal level of stress.

The other two causes of stress are FEAR of the unknown and UNCERTAINTY over what’s required.

Today I’m going to dig into Fear of the unknown, and next week, we’ll get into the uncertainty aspect.

So, fear of the unknown is literally the unseen nature of an exam. 

We don’t know what they’re going to ask about.
We don’t know exactly what topics will or won’t be covered.
We don’t know what the questions will be.
 

This is all centered around subject knowledge. Subject knowledge is the first half of the study success formula. Sometimes I even call it the exam success formula. 
Knowledge + Application = Success.

And the fear of the unknown is the knowledge part.Your teen’s brain might be spinning  with worry about things like:

What questions and topics will come up? 
Will I know the answers?
What topics do I know really well? 
Which ones am I less strong on?

Or, in other words - ‘What do I hope they’ll ask about?’ and ‘What do I really hope they don’task about?’

Now, there’s inherently going to be some stress around the unknown. Remember stress is caused by a feeling of not having control, and your teen can’t control what will be asked in the exam. But, your teen’s stress will be increased if they don’t feel confident in their subject knowledge. Therefore, when they’re feeling stressed and you or they feel like the stress level is above what is healthy or optimal for alertness, memory and focus, one thing you can do is calmly question:

Is the stress coming from a lack of subject knowledge - a lack of confidence in understanding a topic? 

Is there an underlying worry about ‘what if this topic comes up?’ Or ‘I hope they don’t ask about X because I don’t know or understand that topic well enough.’

As a guide, if your teen doesn’t rate themselves an 8 or more out of ten, then this may well be a cause of added exam stress.

And if they don’t, then we need to consider how to solve for this. And I say 8 just as an arbitrary number. I’ve picked that as what I would personally deem a good level of topic knowledge and confidence in that topic when actually walking into the exam. For an exam I think that once we get down to 7’s or below, we’re likely starting to silently hope that topic doesn’t come up. 

So, the next question to ask is - did they ever feel like at least an 8 out of 10? As in when they first learnt it did they get it? If so, then this is about revision. They’ve just forgotten parts of it and that’s normal. We often need spaced repetition for something to stick, and that’s why they have to revise. And I’ll come onto that in a moment.

If they NEVER felt like they were at least an 8 out of 10, then they likely need to actually learn the topic or concept more comprehensively. You can’t revise something you never fully understood in the first place. Learning is different to revising.

You can see that figuring this out with your teen requires some honesty and awareness on their part. Because if they don’t diagnose the root cause, then they can’t really take the best form of action.

Now, if they need to really go back and fully learn a concept or process, then they might do well to find a time to sit with their teacher and ask them to go through it with them, or have a friend who is confident do that with them, or you might use a subject-specific tutor, or online education videos or websites. Whatever will work best for them.

Anyway, back to the second option - that they did once know and understand it well, but now they need to revise it to bring that knowledge and confidence level back up. 

I always advise students to at least know something about every topic that could be asked about in the exam. If time is tight then covering a bit of everything is generally safer in my experience than being really strong in some areas but really weak in others, because otherwise they’re relying on the ‘right’ in inverted commas topics coming up, and if they don’t it can be disastrous. Well, disastrous is a bit dramatic, but it’s not good. We just don’t want a situation where they can’t write at least something for a question. Because it’s pretty easy to pick up the low level marks in questions, and we definitely want them to grab all of the low hanging fruit in an exam.

But actually actioning this, actually prioritising and putting more time into the weaker areas during revision, can be tricky! Because we naturally want to work on things we’re good at. We are happier revising topics we like or do well in, when actually we need to do the opposite.  So, if your teen’s in this situation, I would advise them to list out all the topics for an exam, have them use the syllabus dot points for that - don’t just rely on the notes they have, they really need to consult the exam board documents - and rank or rate them in terms of how strong they are in each of them. And then prioritise those with the lowest scores in their revision plan. 

And that leads me to the revision itself.

Revision needs to be active. 

I see SO many students revising using passive revision techniques. Copying out diagrams relying on repetition to burn it into their memories. Writing info onto cards without transforming it in some way. Reading over notes, watching tutorial videos.

These are all passive.

In order to make revision ACTIVE the information they’re revising needs to be converted or transformed in some way. I discussed this in detail in episode 52 - literally titled Active Revision, so go download and listen to that for more ideas and explanations on how to have your teen revise actively rather than passively so that the information stays in their memory bank and flows from brain to paper in the exam hall.

And quick note here - practising past papers is not technically revision.

It’s a way to see how well they know the content (so might be a way to see if they would rate themselves an 8 or more out of ten or how strong their knowledge really is), but it’s more a way to practise and hone exam technique. It’s not actually revision in itself. 
And exam technique and having your teen be able to actually SHOW they know this subject content is what we’ll get into on the next episode: addressing the uncertainty that so many students have around what the examiners want, what the questions mean and what the mark schemes state as required in the answers - in other words how to put that knowledge and information that they’ve learnt and revised across on paper. How to show they know it.

So join me back here next week for that, and be sure to click follow on the podcast so you automatically get each episode on your phone as soon as it drops. In the mean time, have an awesome rest of your day, and I’ll see you back here next week.