Introduction
All over the world, students enrolled in classes are required to take tests to measure what they have learned over the course of the class. Studying for these tests can cause students a great deal of stress and anxiety, especially when someone feels that they are unprepared and do not know the information that they need to for them to succeed. As many as 20 percent of students in the United States have severe test anxiety, and an additional 18 percent have moderate test anxiety (Strauss, 2013), much of which comes from a student feeling not in control of their success. This being said, if a student feels confident that they know the information that they are studying, they will likely have much lower
stress levels compared to someone who does not feel that they are prepared. This same pattern can be seen if someone is told they are going to be “graded” on a task they are asked to perform. If someone is familiar with the task they will likely be far less stressed/anxious than someone who has never been exposed to such a task before.
Preparing for exams in college is stressful for almost every student.
It is known that stress often elicits a variety of physiological stress response such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, but more recently it has been seen that these physical responses vary depending on the situation that is causing someone stress (Kemeny, 2003). Additionally, in a study done in 2004 by Bernston and Cacioppo, it was seen that computer-related stress was seen to increase low-to-high heart rate variability among individuals. Another commonly known physical sign of stress is an increased respiratory rate (Suess, Alexander, Smith, Sweeny & Marion, 1980). During the time leading up to an exam, many
students sacrifice sleep in order to prepare, which can have very adverse effects on their performance. Medical students were seen to suffer from worse sleep leading up to their exams rather than after them, and it was seen that poor sleep quality before the exams was correlated with poor performance (Ahrberg, Dresler, Niedermajer, Steiger & Genzel, 2012). Students who are stressed during their studying and fail to get
enough sleep often have higher levels of test anxiety, and these students were seen to perform significantly worse on exams (Cassady & Johnson, 2002).
Subjects will be given a 15-minute time limit and will be instructed to complete 8 levels of the Kami 2 game: page 2 level 4, page 3 level 3, page 4 level 6, page 5 level 5, page 6 level 4, page 7 level 6, page 9 level 3, and page 19 level 3.
During this time we will be monitoring the respiratory rate, skin conductance, EMG, and pulse. We expect to see that as levels of this puzzle get more difficult, cognitive stress will become greater and be seen by several physical stress response symptoms such as increased heart rate and as well as increased respiration rate and skin conductance. In 2002, Van Galen et al. found that individuals with high anxiety have higher EMG measures that those with low anxiety and are less stressed. Additionally, higher trapezoid EMG signals were found in test subjects under stressful conditions rather than during periods of rest (Wijsman et al, 2013).
It is expected that a change from baseline during the experiment will occur among all subjects and that change will be greater within students from the Clarkson University School of Business. Our results will be able to help understand the relationship between experiences in an area of study or skill and an individual’s stress when performing difficult tasks.