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Test anxiety can harm students’ academic success, but a new initiative at Moorpark College found that learners who have more time to take math tests perform better than their peers.
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Many college students struggle with math anxiety or test taking, which can make entry-level math courses even more challenging.
Administrators at Moorpark College in California were interested in understanding the relationship between students’ testing experience and how they performed in the class over all, so they piloted a testing intervention this past spring, asking professors to reduce test content or extend testing time.
The program saw more students pass the classes, with greater gains among historically disadvantaged students in math, including women and Black students. Survey data also highlighted students’ decreased anxiety around testing, the added ability to review mistakes and increased confidence making educated guesses.
The background: Early childhood education research points to the value of timed testing for math skills, such as multiplication tables, to build students’ skills and overall learning, but time pressure doesn’t benefit learners later on in higher education, explains Oleg Bespalov, dean of institutional effectiveness at Moorpark, part of the Ventura County Community College District.
One of the misconceptions around testing is that reduced content or extended time decreases the academic integrity or rigor of the assessment. Moorpark faculty members consider the initiative to be centered on a growth mindset, instead allowing students to grow from their mistakes and show full mastery of the content without unnecessary stress.
Further, while some careers do demand students to meet high-pressure deadlines, few of them require complex mathematics to be completed in under an hour, meaning the experience isn’t setting students up for future success, either.
To test this theory, Moorpark used grant funding to incentivize faculty to reimagine their assessments, by increasing testing time, decreasing the length of the test or both.
How Flexible Should Faculty Be?
Flexibility is a key desire among today’s college students, with recent survey results from Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice study finding 31 percent of learners want faculty members to be more flexible with deadlines and 25 percent want professors to use alternative grading practices.
The argument against flexibility, in addition to prioritizing faculty member’s time and workload, is that deadlines and structure promote student achievement and dropping them is a detriment to learning.
A recent study from Cornell University found flexible deadline policies that allowed students to submit assignments for no penalty around one to two weeks after the deadline gave students more agency with their schedule and helped them be less stressed.
How it works: The college put out a call to mathematics faculty members to join a community of practice. Professors were eligible to participate if they had taught the course before (allowing data collection both before and after) and received $1,250 per course they chose to revise. Eight faculty members opted in to the experiment in spring 2023.
Rena Weiss, a mathematics professor at Moorpark, was granted faculty release time to monitor innovations at projects in math courses at the college and oversaw the experiment, among others.
Funding Change
State law has reduced the availability of remedial courses at California public institutions, but not all students are academically prepared to enter college-level courses, requiring new and innovative kinds of interventions to promote student success in these classes.
The California Community College system allocated $64 million in one-time funding to support developmental education reform policies in the 2022 budget, which was allocated to colleges across the state to improve successful completion of transfer-level math and English courses. Moorpark College received $829,920.33 in funding, which covers this experiment and future iterations of it.
Faculty met monthly in their community of practice to share ideas, problems and data. There was no formal requirement for how testing had to change, other than it must reduce the amount of time pressure on students through shortening the test or lengthening time to complete it.
“We wanted this open-ended within your own teaching style—do what you think will provide more time per question for the student,” Weiss says.
To accommodate the extra time needed, many professors chose to partner with the testing center to deliver tests, allowing learners to complete their exam during one of two time slots that given week. This decision also freed up scheduled class time for additional teaching or test prep, Weiss says.
Claudia Gutierrez taught Math M10, Mathematics for Elementary Teachers, and opted to double students’ testing time from the usual 75-minute class period to 2.5 hours. Students completed their exams in the campus testing center, proctored by center staff. Gutierrez also taught a precalculus course that had both shorter exams and lengthened time for testing.
Faculty members made sure to maintain the rigor of their assessments, just making testing less lengthy.
The impact: Across the 44 sections and 963 students in the experiment, students earned an A, B or C grade 4.4 percentage points more (56 percent), compared to their peers in traditionally taught courses and the same course taught the year prior. Women had a 9.1-percentage-point higher rate of passing the class, as well.
Moorpark’s data also pointed to a 26.9-percentage-point increase among Black students, but the experiment population was too small for the data to be statistically valid, says Oleg Bespalov.
In surveys, Gutierrez’s students said the additional time provided more time to review their test for mistakes, plus they were less rushed, had less testing anxiety and felt more confident in making educated guesses on multiple-choice questions.
This could be due to the extra time only, but Gutierrez also made sure to remind students that they had extra time to check their work and that there wasn’t pressure to be the first one done, helping make the environment more comfortable. The testing center option also allowed students with other responsibilities (such as work or caregiving priorities) to choose when to take their exam in a way that fit their schedules.
Looking ahead: Moorpark leaders plan to include additional math faculty members in a second phase of the experiment, providing similar stipends for first-time participants and smaller funds for returning professors.
While shortening the test did help students with their testing anxiety, Gutierrez says it created a downstream effect where there was more material she wanted to cover in later tests, so she’s looking to deliver tests more frequently to ensure all course content is assessed.
Leaders are also bracing to see if having more professors participate in the experiment creates a greater demand for the testing center, which in turn could lessen availability of that space.
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