The Impact of Chewing Gum on Test Anxiety

The nursing shortage continues to remain a problem in the United States. To improve the nursing shortage, more nursing students must complete a nursing program, apply for licensure, and pass the national certification examination. Nursing school examinations carry the most weight in the final grade of nursing courses. Thus, these examinations become the greatest academic stress for nursing students. Currently, there is a lack of an effective intervention for test anxiety on undergraduate nursing students during an examination. This grant proposal intends to study the impact of chewing gum on test anxiety during a nursing examination for undergraduate nursing students in a randomized controlled trial research with the use of a two-group pretest-post test design. This study is significant to nursing since the intervention may be suitable and applicable to any nursing examination as a strategy for a advanced practice nurse or a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner to address a nursing student’s test anxiety in an effort to alleviate the national nursing shortage.