Test Anxiety

Introduction

‘Test anxiety’ refers to the set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioural responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an examination or similar evaluative situation (Zeidner, 1998). ‘Test anxious’ students are characterized by a particularly low response threshold for anxiety in evaluative situations, tending to view test situations as personally threatening. They tend to react with extensive worry, mental disorganization, tension, and physiological arousal when exposed to evaluative situations (Spielberger & Vagg, 1995). Test anxiety is often accompanied by maladaptive cognitions such as threat perceptions, feelings of reduced self-efficacy, anticipatory failure attributions, and coping through self-criticism (e.g. Matthews et al., 1999). A widely accepted definition proposed by Spielberger (e.g. 1980) construes test anxiety as a situation-specific personality trait. ‘Test anxiety’ may also refer to stressful evaluative stimuli and contexts, and fluctuating anxiety states experienced in a test situation. In general, trait test anxiety and evaluative situations may be seen as interacting to provoke states of anxiety (Sarason et al., 1995).

Test anxiety research has prospered, in part, due to the increasing personal salience of test situations for people in modern society, making tests and their long-term consequences significant educational, social, and clinical problems for many. Indeed, test anxiety figures prominently as one of the key villains in the ongoing drama surrounding psycho-educational testing, as a source of both scholastic underachievement and psychological distress. Many students have the ability to do well on exams, but perform poorly because of their debilitating levels of anxiety. Test anxiety may also jeopardize assessment validity in the cognitive domain and constitute a major source of ‘test bias’, in that anxious examinees may perform less well than their ability and skills would otherwise allow. Much of the test anxiety research over the past half century has been conducted to help shed light on the negative effects of test anxiety on examinee performance and these concerns have stimulated the development of a variety of assessment methods, to which we now turn.

Self-Report Instruments

Self-report assessments of test anxiety responses are most often elicited via questionnaires. Self-reports have become the most popular format for assessing test anxiety because they are considered to provide the most direct access to a person's subjective experiential states in evaluative situations, they possess good psychometric properties, they are relatively inexpensive to produce, and they are simple to administer and score. Self-report paper-and-pencil questionnaire measures of trait measures ask subjects to report symptoms they typically[Page 965]or generally experience in test situations, whereas state anxiety scales ask individuals to report which of the relevant symptoms of anxiety they are currently experiencing in a particular test situation. Next, we briefly walk the reader through a number of salient issues in the development and validation of self-report measures.