How to help kids destroy their test anxiety
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This post was written by Laura Hubbard, Everydae’s Director of Academics. Laura has 10,000+ hours of tutoring and tutor-training experience. She was previously Director of Academics for the adaptive learning product ORION, directed curriculum creation at AJ Tutoring, and was a course writer at Chegg and manager at The Princeton Review.
Nearly 40% of students say they have anxiety around the SAT. And it’s no surprise — they’re told that the test is going to determine their entire futures and it’s unlike any test they’ve ever taken before.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let me tell you a story.
I went to a public high school in South Carolina. We were known for two things: a terrible football team and tons of National Merit Semifinalists. The secret to both? Practice. (Or, in the case of our football team, lack of practice.)
We had a teacher who made it his mission to make the SAT feel just like any other test. He taught at both our middle and high school, and after every test he’d give us a section of a PSAT for homework. By the time I got to junior year, I think I must have seen 20 complete PSATs. The PSAT and SAT themselves felt like any other test because I’d seen it all before — it felt normal.
I thought about Dr. B’s strategy a lot as a tutor. Forcing students to cram for the SAT in prep classes and tutoring sessions wasn’t just bad for learning. It made the SAT into something exceptional. Something to be feared. We weren’t just not helping with students test anxiety. We were helping create it.
At Everydae, we believe that part of ensuring student success on the SAT is making it a normal part of life, not something to be feared. Instead of making our students show up for a cram-course, we help them conquer the test in just 10 minutes a day in the months leading up to the exam.
And by including information about college and career readiness beyond the SAT, we help our students put their studies in context and connect what they’re studying to why they’re studying it.
We’re changing the way the world thinks about standardized tests. Want to join us?
