Performance Priming

There is more and more evidence that performance on high stakes activities or tests can be heavily influenced by the “mindset” of the performer.  This is proving to be true in all sorts of situations, and sports psychologists have made a living on that idea for a long time.  Now the science is catching up with the anecdotes.

We have discussed the possibility of influencing girls’ performance on math tests by mentioning that boys do better than girls in math.  Merely telling a class of kids that you expect them to do very well on an exam can increase their performance significantly.  Jonah Lehrer, on his blog “The Frontal Cortex”, outlines a new study about sports that shows a similar phenomenon.

Golfers, whose performance requirements are very specific and who require a remarkable level of fine motor skill, seem like an excellent test case.  The three groups in the experiment, all similar types of golfers, were asked to think of different things as they played.  One group was asked to think of something random, like “blue” or “white”.  One group was asked to consider something specific about their technique: “straight wrist”, “follow through”.  The last group was asked to focus on something general, but abstractly related to their performance, a “holistic cue word”: “smoothness”, “balance”.

Gucciardi and Dimmock got two interesting results: the first was that anxiety only interfered with performance when it was coupled with self-consciousness. Nervous golfers who thought about the details of their swing, such as how to position their hips, hit consistently worse shots. That makes sense, since one of the main causes of choking is “thinking too much,” as we start analyzing actions (like a golf swing) that are best performed on autopilot.

The second interesting result was that there was a way to ward off choking. When the expert golfers contemplated a holistic cue word, their performance was no longer affected by anxiety. Because the positive adjectives were vague and generic, they didn’t cause the athletes to lose the flow of expert performance or overrule their automatic brain.  via The Frontal Cortex

As teachers prepare their kids for high stakes tests (such as the IB exams that start in a couple of weeks, round the world), they would be wise to consider these findings.  There are specific techniques that will help students on a standardized exam like IB or the SAT, but what we really want students to rely on is their “automatic brains”, what we’ve asked them to practice and practice, for the past two years or more.  The last test-taking details shouldn’t detract from the goal of relaxed, creative thought, nor should it produce any sort of anxiety in the test taker, ideally.

Anyone have something to say about the psychology or the neuroscience of test taking?  Leave a comment, or a link to something to read.

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