What Happens When We Reassure Students That Anxiety Is Normal

In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks and Debra Viadero report on research about students’ emotional reactions to school transitions. In one study in Madison, Wisconsin, 1,190 sixth graders were randomly assigned to take part in an experiment. As they entered middle school, the students were asked to read several pages of quotes from a survey that students like them took at the end of the previous school year. The quotes conveyed the idea that anxiety was typical and transitory – for example, “I felt like I had a knot in my stomach the first four months,” but that the teachers “were there to help you” and the negative feelings dissipated. The students in the experimental group were then asked to write their reactions to the quotes. 

When the researchers followed up with the incoming sixth graders the following spring, they found striking differences between those in the experimental and control groups:

• Students in the experimental group had higher ratings in social belonging, school trust, and school identification and lower ratings of evaluation anxiety.
• They had higher GPAs and fewer Ds and Fs.
• They had been absent one day less. 
• They had fewer behavior referrals.

“It turns out children are better able to cope if they understand what they’re going through is normal, that it affects everyone, and that it will pass,” comments Adam Gamoran of the William T. Grant Foundation. “How we think about a stressful situation influences how we feel and how we perform.” Studies like this, he says, “show how deeply intertwined are cognition and emotion.” 

“Studies Affirm Role of Emotions in Students’ Transitions” by Sarah Sparks and Debra Viadero in Education Week, April 20, 2016 (Vol. 35, #28), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #634