Exam anxiety can make students seriously underperform. Can supportive comments through social media help release exam anxiety? In this paper, Deloatch et al. try to answer this question. Their experiment investigates how supportive comments from social media affect anxiety as compared with a widely used method, expressive writing. The experimental settings are well designed, and an interesting method has been formulated to simulate anxiety through additional monetary rewards, that is, additional money will be given to a student and his/her teammates as a reward if they have scored at least 75 percent on the problems.

They recruited 88 undergraduate students in the computer science department to participate in the experiment, and the students were asked to attend a test to solve two open-ended programming problems in 40 minutes. The two interventions, expressive writing and social supports, are then applied prior to the test. For social supports, the students are asked to post a request for encouragement to their online social network on the date before the test, and at the same time they are instructed to refrain from viewing the response until just before the test. Cognitive test anxiety (CTA) and the state trait anxiety inventory (STAI) are used to measure the participant’s cognitive test, state, and trait anxieties.

The results obtained from the experiments for both expressive writing and supportive comments are positive, showing they can significantly decrease the state anxiety of highly test-anxious students by 21 percent before performing a mentally stressful activity, and the number of messages received has been found to be positively correlated with the reduction in anxiety. However, the experimental results also reveal that expressive writing increases the anxiety of low test-anxiety students by more than 60 percent. This is strange and no support is given to explain the results. Another finding from the experiment is that many students are uncomfortable with requesting social support from their online social network. This is a serious problem since this can discourage students from using social media to reduce test anxiety. To provide more conclusive findings, more experiments should be designed with the participation of more students to investigate how we can encourage students to use social media supports to reduce anxiety before examinations.