2. AFFIRM YOUR VALUES.

Apprehension over tests can be especially common among minority and female students. That’s because the prospect of evaluation poses for them what psychologists call “stereotype threat”—the possibility that a poor performance will confirm negative assumptions about the group to which they belong (among the specious, anxiety-inducing tropes: girls can’t excel in math and science; blacks and Latinos aren’t college material). This additional layer of anxiety can lead such students to perform below the level they are capable of. “Girls, and black and Latino students, are often dealing with a double dose of test anxiety,” says Stanford University psychologist Gregory Walton. “The nervousness everyone feels when they’re being evaluated, plus the worry—conscious or not—that a poor performance will prove that the negative assumption about their group is correct.”

[Related: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype?]

Walton’s colleague at Stanford, psychology professor Geoffrey Cohen, devised an intervention aimed at reducing stereotype threat. Like the exercise designed by Beilock and Ramirez, it asks students to write briefly, but in this case participants are instructed to choose something they value and write about why it matters to them. “Music is important to me because it gives me a way to express myself when I’m mad, happy, or sad,” one participant wrote. In one study, this “values affirmation” exercise was shown to shrink the performance gap between white and black students by 40 percent. In another, it erased the gap in test scores between women and men enrolled in a challenging college physics course, raising the women’s average grade from a C to a B (higher than the average male student’s grade).

3. ENGAGE IN RELAXATION EXERCISE.

Younger kids aren’t immune from test anxiety. As early as first and second grade, researchers see evidence of anxiety about testing. Their worries tend to manifest in non-verbal signs that adults may miss, says psychologist Heidi Larson: stomachaches, difficulty sleeping, and a persistent urge to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. “I had one mother tell me that her son had no problem with tests,” recalls Larson, a professor of counseling and student development at Eastern Illinois University. “Then a week later she came back and said that her son had burst into tears the night before the big end-of-year exam, saying that he was afraid he wouldn’t be promoted to the next grade.”

[Related: How to Deal With Kids' Math Anxiety]

Larson designed an intervention especially for younger students, involving breathing and relaxation exercises, and examined its effectiveness on a group of third-graders. “We had students lie on mats on the floor of their classrooms. They closed their eyes and we asked them to focus on their breathing, then on tensing and relaxing groups of muscles in their legs, arms, stomachs and so on,” Larson recounts. “Some of the kids became so relaxed they fell asleep!” A control group of students at another school received no such training. The study, which was published in the Journal of School Counseling in 2010, reported that the relaxation intervention had “a significant effect in reducing test anxiety.”

Read Annie Murphy Paul's full feature article on test anxiety in the current issue of Time.