NEWBURGH, N.Y. -- "There's no doubt that students today are under different types of pressures for lots of different kinds of reasons," Pyschologist Doctor Rudy Nydegger said.

A study conducted by the New York State School Boards Association and the New York Association of School Psychologists found that students have greater anxiety on state exams than local exams.

"They are continually being tested and retested for various different kinds of reasons," Nydegger said, "and given all these different messages of how terribly important this is, and told things like 'Your future depends upon this, you want to do well.'  

New York State school-certified psychologist Kelly Casi helped to compile the results of the study and says sometimes anxiety can be a good thing, but too much can have a negative effect.

"Anxiety can be a good thing in terms of performance," she said. "When we have too much anxiety, that can affect our performance in terms of our ability to perform well on tests. If we're overly anxious, it's difficult to pay attention and oftentimes hard to retrieve information when we need it on tests."

Casi says there are various ways anxiety can affect the students.

"We see both of what we call internalized anxiety and externalized anxiety," she said. "So internalized, we will see kids just being overly nervous, anxious. At times, withdrawing from things that might be challenging to them and externalized type behaviors can be things like crying, acting-out behaviors; some times we will see physical behaviors, headaches or stomach aches."

The study finds 88 percent of psychologists believe parental pressure contributes to the anxiety of children, while 76 percent of psychologists say when students take state versus local exams their anxiety increases. And 60 percent of psychologists say anxiety is greater now than before the Common Core Learning Standards went into effect.

Kremer says the numbers are higher for younger children because they don’t know how to deal with stress and anxiety.

"They don’t understand what they're dealing with," he said. "They've been given a lot of erroneous information about how important this is, and they don’t really quite know how to deal with it and they don’t have a lot of practice."

Psychologists want parents to know that students' anxiety can be managed.

"Have teachers and parents aware that there are practitioners in the schools in the form of school psychologists, in addition to social workers and school counselors who can help children cope with anxiety in relation to testing,” Nydegger said.

Psychologists say parents shouldn't make tests seem like the end-all, be-all of education.They say tests are in place to manage what their kids are learning and how they can do better in school. 

For more information about the anxiety study and how you can help your child, visit http://www.nyasp.org/​.