Emily+Atchison+and+Lily+Holmes

=How Test Anxiety affects Heartrate in Different Genders =

ALRIGHT, REBOOT.

A common ailment among high-school-age students is test anxiety, which we can define as stress or pressure in a testing situation, such as finals. As we know, both men and women suffer from test anxiety, but whom does it affect more? Generally, men become stressed when there are sudden changes to a routine, like a job switch or a schedule change, while women become stressed with long-term problems that they need to deal with. Some common factors of stress are an increased heart rate, eye dilation, and tensed muscles (“Stress”). Seeing as we can’t exactly measure eye dilation or muscle tension with the supplies our school is provided with, heart rate was the best bet.

HYPOTHESIS: If we give participants a difficult test, then the heart rate of the male participants will have a broader range than the heart rate of the female participants.

MATERIALS:
 * Tests
 * Candy (Milky way, Snickers, Twix, 3 Musketeers, and Starburst)
 * EKG Monitor
 * Laptop with Logger Pro software installed
 * Pencil
 * Consistent Testing Environment

PROCEDURE:
 * 1) Hook up participant to an EKG machine to monitor heart rate
 * 2) Give participant the test
 * 3) Start recording heart rate for five minutes
 * 4) In the middle of the test, tell participant that they must answer six questions correctly to receive any candy (the biggest motivator for teenagers in the history of ever)
 * 5) When the participant finishes the test, save data and pretend to look over test.
 * 6) Give participant candy anyway.

The test that was given was specifically designed to frustrate participants. It was a twenty question, multiple-choice test, yet only six questions actually had a correct answer. The test consisted of everything from chemistry to movie references to calculus.

Graphs:





ANALYSIS:

During the test, once the tester mentioned the candy was only given if a certain number of answers were correct, the heart rates of the participants seemed to spike, causing more variation in the heart rate. Females maintained a more consistent range of BPM, whereas males seemed to have a more varied range. One can clearly see from the spikes on the chart where the participant reached a new question on the test. At a certain point, however, many participants appeared to stop caring about the results, due to the difficulty of the questions. Also, participants began to think out loud. Most of the time, they were reading the question out loud, and in some cases, expletives were released. (Names will not be given. This //was// a confidential test after all.) Teenagers think aloud when in a secluded environment, which was an interesting fact we discovered.

CONCLUSION: Our hypothesis proved to be correct, as the males had a broader range of heart rates compared to the females.