Can teaching upper primary about the ‘testing effect’ increase feelings of confidence about test-taking?

Hembree’s (1988) large and heavily cited meta-analysis of 562 studies about test anxiety found that test anxiety affects girls more than boys and can start at the ages of seven to eight years (Year 3 to Year 4). Test anxiety is a transactional construct that affects performance of working memory. One aspect of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory (1997) is that self-belief – belief in capability – can raise performance. A six-week intervention using metacognition of the ‘testing effect’ desirable difficulty was delivered to a group of 10- to 11-year-olds (Year 6) prior to a high-stakes examination. This intervention aimed to enable 10- to 11-year-olds to believe that new metacognitive knowledge can be used to give self-efficacy in test-taking – to believe that testing routes in the brain have been primed and that they have the ‘mastery’ of the metacognition of self-efficacy. This is the first study of its kind, aiming to link the metacognition of the testing effect to pr