“One bout of writing about test anxiety can substantially increase
students’ test scores and prevent the dreaded choke.” — SIAN BEILOCK
The write stuff
for test anxiety

By Bruce Bower

High school and college students can go from choking to smoking on big tests by writing about their exam fears beforehand, a new study suggests.

In what amounts to a Heimlich maneuver for choking under pressure, writing down test-related worries for 10 minutes before taking a major exam appears to dislodge those concerns and clear the way for higher achievement, say psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago.

Writing about unspoken fears of
failure and related anxieties lets stu-
dents reevaluate such concerns and
keeps worries at bay during a test,
Ramirez and Beilock propose in the
Jan. 14 Science.

Recalling a taste of the Iron Age
Barley grains offer savory insights into ancient Celtic malt

By Bruce Bower

Early rulers of a community in what’s now southwestern Germany liked to party, staging elaborate feasts in a ceremonial center. The business side of their revelries was in a nearby brewery capable of turning out large quantities of a beer with a dark, smoky, slightly sour taste, new evidence suggests.

Six ditches at Eberdingen-Hochdorf, a 2,550-year-old Celtic settlement, were used to make high-quality barley malt, a key beer ingredient, says archaeobota-nist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. Thousands of charred grains unearthed in the ditches came from a large malt-making enterprise, Stika reports in a paper published online January 4 in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

authority on ancient beer. The oldest known beer residue and brewing facilities date to 5,500 years ago in the Middle East, but archaeological clues to beer’s past are rare (SN: 10/2/04, p. 216).

At the Celtic site, barley was soaked in the specially constructed ditches until it sprouted, Stika proposes. Grains were then dried by fires at the ends of the ditches, giving the malt a smoky taste and a darkened color. The growth of lactic acid bacteria stimulated by slow drying of grains added sourness to the brew.

Unlike modern beers that are flavored with flowers of the hop plant, the Eberdingen-Hochdorf brew probably contained spices such as mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane, in Stika’s opinion. Beer makers are known to have used these additives by medieval times. Excavations at the Celtic site have yielded a few seeds of henbane, a plant that also makes beer more intoxicating. ea a

vored with flowers of the hop plant,
Stika bases that conclusion on a close
resemblance of the ancient grains to
barley malt that he made by reproduc-
ing several methods that Iron Age folk
might have used. He also compared the
ancient grains with malt produced in
modern facilities. Upon confirming the
presence of malt at the Celtic site, Stika
reconstructed malt-making techniques
there to determine how they must
have affected beer taste.