The effect of mindfulness training on reducing student's test anxiety

test anxiety is a kind of mental self-employment which is characterized by self-underestimation and doubts about one’s capabilities and often leads to negative cognitive evaluation, lack of concentration, improper physical reactions and a decline in educational performance. Various methods have been proposed to reduce anxiety. One of these methods is called mindfulness. Mindfulness means to intentionally focus and openly concentrate on the occurrence of thoughts, feeling, and excitements without any judgments in the present. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of mindfulness on reducing students’ test anxiety. to this end, a semi-experimental study with pre-test, post-test and control group was performed, 33 students were selected by the accessible sampling and were applied randomly to the test group and control group. The subjects were assessed in terms of test anxiety, Perceived threat of test and looming threat style before and after conducting the study. The control group, in the presence of a psychologist, attempted to practice mindfulness during the first ten minutes of the class as a group and then talked to the instructor about their worries about the test ten minutes. No intervention was performed in the control group. The covariance analysis results indicate that training mindfulness can have a significant effect on reducing students’ test anxiety and Perceived threat of test. It seems that while learning mindfulness, the capacity and ability of the information processing system increases and these exercises can in turn, act as primary alarm system and initiate a mental conflict against anxiety.