ABSTRACT
Being judged by someone else often elevates stress levels. Reflect back on the last time a colleague observed your teaching. Stress responses are common, natural, and adaptive. But stress can reach uncomfortable, even unhealthy, levels based on a variety of factors. In assessing students, we may encounter evaluation anxiety, performance anxiety, stage fright, or test anxiety. There’s debate regarding whether each is distinct or whether they are the same thing but occur under different sets of conditions. That debate is well beyond the scope of this book. For the purposes of this entry, we’re going to refer to evaluation anxiety. Evaluation anxiety can also mix with other kinds of anxieties, like math anxiety, language anxiety, or writing anxiety, in your specific domain.
