The Effects of CBT on Academic Performance for Anxious Students

Test anxiety has a negative impact on the college success of many students. This study attempts to identify interventions that may decrease test anxiety. Previous research on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) suggest that it may be a useful approach for dealing with anxiety, including test anxiety, and therefore will lead to improved test performance. Approximately 40 college students will serve as the participants in the study. All participants will complete the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI) in order to differentiate more test anxious students from less test anxious students. Each participant will then be assigned to one of two experimental groups. One group will view a student-created video that teaches a relaxation technique called systematic desensitization (a form of CBT) that exposes participants to a hierarchy of anxiety-producing stimuli. The other group will view a typical inspirational-type video available on YouTube. All participants will then take a short quantitative test that was pulled from past GRE quantitative sections. It is expected that students with and without test-anxiety will benefit more from the CBT treatment than the inspirational video, but the test-anxious students will benefit proportionally more from CBT than the less test anxious students. The expected findings will hopefully suggest a technique that students can use before taking a test in order to reduce anxiety and help them perform