ABSTRACT
The success of learners who encounter negative affective states within educational settings is tied to researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to detect at-risk students and guide them to appropriate academic supports. This chapter begins with a discussion of how restricted attention to aspects of anxiety and problematic diagnostic criteria for emotional disturbance have interfered with educators’ ability to support at-risk students. For instance, learners with academic anxieties (e.g., test anxiety) are not eligible to receive academic supports unless a broader form of anxiety is assessed and documented. In this chapter, we discuss methods of assessing academic anxiety and emotional disabilities that fall within and outside existing diagnostic frameworks and advocate for increased attention to supporting learners who struggle to function at an optimal level, but do not meet formal diagnostic criteria. This chapter also discusses causes of emotional challenges in school settings to enable more effective interventions. Since the 1980s, interventions have struggled to derive positive outcomes among “high anxiety” learners. Our work, however, has suggested that these null effects are in part an artifact of a mismatch between “sources” of test anxiety and the focus of intervention efforts. Effectively differentiating among subtypes of test-anxious students can overcome the traditional problem of assuming that all test-anxious learners are alike and allow educators to tailor intervention efforts to meet their needs more effectively. Finally, we provide an overview of the emotional information processing model (Cassady & Boseck, 2008), which identifies a recursive self-regulated framework for detecting and responding to affective signals within the individual and in the environmental context. Building from this framework, we offer real-world applications to help educators and special needs support teams identify areas of need and promote the development and internalization of skills and strategies conducive to long-term academic success.
