Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Test anxiety affects girls more than boys (Hembree 1988) and from as young an age as 7-8. Test anxiety is a transactionalconstruct (Zeidner 1998), which affects performance of the working memory (Eysenck 1992). High Test Anxious studentsare more self-centred and more self-critical than Low Test Anxious students (Zeidner and Matthews 2005). One aspect ofBanduras self-efficacy theory (1997) is that self-belief, belief in capability can raise performance. A 12 week interventionusing metacognition of desirable difficulties in the testing effect (Bjork 1974) and interleaved spaced retrieval (Karpickeand Roediger 2011) was delivered to a small group of Year 6 girls prior to a high stakes (entrance to Senior School)examination. This pilot intervention aimed to enable 10-12 year olds to believe that as you face an important exam, newmetacognitive knowledge can be used to give self-efficacy in test taking; to believe that testing routes in the brain havebeen primed and that belief in oneself is possible because of the mastery of the metacognition of self-efficacy.