Concentrate on your goal.

– Automatic Self-Talk Questionnaire for Sports (ASTQS)

In contrast, sadness and fear are associated with feelings of powerlessness, lack of control, and uncertainty.

– Metacognitive Emotion Regulation: Children’s Awareness that Changing Thoughts and Goals Can Alleviate Negative Emotions

Tests of any kind are meant to measure ability. The words ‘at a certain point in time’ should be added, considering what we now understand as the premises of a ‘growth mindset’. A test is an accurate reflection of ability at a certain point only if it is the best possible performance and so also measures focus.

Put another way, someone who has performed well in a test has done well not only in demonstrating subject mastery but also focus mastery. This person could focus as much as necessary to achieve a goal.

Technological, market and developments of other kinds have led to the conclusion that one delightful performance does not a life make. In parallel, longitudinal studies, intuition, and life itself has shown us that learning and growth can continue and that ability is not a fixed quantity as may have been previously believed. This has resulted in the lowering of the stakes involved in any one performance.

Even so, performance demands can cause anxiety and lower focus. The relationship between performance and ability can be illustrated the following (somewhat simplistic) way:

Focus allows the full application of ability to a task. In classrooms, we focus a lot on the training of skills and increasing knowledge. Many of us would have had at least one experience of a performance which to us seemed miraculous at the time, considering past performances at a similar task. Scientists have confirmed that focus can make a world of difference in performance. It will be useful to also equip students with the tools to focus their abilities better.

One important ability which enables the training (concentration) of focus on a task as necessary is emotional regulation. Emotional experiences can be positive, negative, or neutral.

Negative emotions associated with performance tasks are usually, anger, sadness, and fear. Of these three, fear very common before and during performances.

In a study published in 2010, a group of American researchers, Davis and others, presented their findings on whether children as young as 5 and 6 were able to regulate negative emotions. Their study is useful to understand the nature of negative emotions and the available strategies to regulate such emotions.

According to them, sadness occurs when a person has accepted as final a bad outcome and fear is the natural response when “goal failure is threatened but has not yet occurred” (Davis et al., 2010). They add that sadness and fear are “associated with feelings of powerlessness, lack of control, and uncertainty”. Interestingly, they say that anger occurs when someone is unable to achieve a goal but believes that they can do something to get things back on track.

To put these feelings in context, a student may feel frustrated or angry when the answer is not immediately forthcoming. Fear may occur when anticipating the consequences of failure. Sadness may be the response when one ties one’s performance outcome to one’s inadequacies about which not much can be done.

It is possible to lower feelings of uncertainty, lack of control and powerlessness in a particular task which is to be tested, through first, an awareness of the kind of difficulties that may arise when attempting the task and second, an awareness of the strategies that can be employed when such difficulties arise. These two kinds of awareness can be increased in the classroom.

David and others (2010) highlighted seven categories of strategies that can be used to make a negative feeling such as anger, sadness or fear go away. These are

• Goal reinstatement
• Goal substitution
• Goal forfeiture
• Primary social support
• Secondary social support
• Agent-focused strategies
• Metacognitive strategies

Goal forfeiture is what is otherwise known as giving up. During an exam, this may not be an ideal strategy. The two categories of strategies which may be most useful to overcome anxiety to perform well would be, goal reinstatement and metacognitive strategies.

Goal reinstatement is when the students remind themselves of the goal and take some action to overcome whatever it is that stands between them and the goal. In an exam situation, this action should be one of the difficulty-matched strategies mentioned earlier.

Metacognitive strategies require students to direct their thoughts one way or the other. There are two types of metacognitive strategies. The first type is to change thoughts and the second type is to change goals.

Metacognitive strategies which require changing goals pertain to exam strategies and better addressed in consultation with individual students.

Davis and others (2010) found evidence that children as young as 5 and 6, understood the relationship between thoughts and feelings. There is conclusive evidence that before anxiety takes hold and hampers performance, there would first be the appearance of negative thoughts in the mind.

Students would need a way to deal with these negative thoughts. An effective way to do this would be through self-talk. Self-talk is a subject area that has been most studied and used in the field of sports. Coaches may tell athletes how to talk to themselves to enhance performance.

A study published this year, Santos-Rosa FJ and others (2022) discusses the types of self-talk student athletes do and how this affects their performance. They confirmed that positive self-talk made athletes more confident, reduced anxiety and improved performance. They made the distinction between spontaneous self-talk and goal-directed self-talk.

According to Latinjak and others (2014) spontaneous self-talk refers to thoughts which occur automatically when faced with a situation which is perceived positively or negatively. Goal-directed self-talk on the other hand refers to a self-selected mental script which aims to propel the student towards a goal.

What exactly do the different types of self-talk sound (or look) like? A group of Sports Science researchers had, in 2009 come up with a questionnaire for sports. This questionnaire is invaluable for its insights on self-talk.

For instance, it tells us that self-talk can be divided into eight categories. These are, psych-up, anxiety control, confidence, instruction, worry, disengagement, somatic (bodily) fatigue and irrelevant thoughts (Zourbanos et al., 2009)

There are specific things students can say to themselves before and during a performance task such as an exam, to psych themselves up, control feelings of worry and fear, increase confidence and direct attention to problem-solve. For example, self-talk can take the form of instructions to self, such as focus on what you need to do now.

To sum up, strong performance requires focus. Focus requires the absence of negative emotions such as fear. Fear and worry can take the form of spontaneous self-talk which comes uninvited to prevent students from focusing on the task at hand. It is important for students to recognise these thoughts when they arise. Crucially, they need to know that they can reject such thoughts and instead replace them with positive self-talk to resume the flow of focus.

They would need awareness of task level difficulties and related strategies and emotion level difficulties and related strategies.

A good word makes the mind sharp.

The Brain Dojo