Test anxiety
Test anxiety, also known as evaluation anxiety, is a psychological condition marked by feelings of apprehension and distress in testing or evaluative contexts. While often linked to academic settings, it can also arise in situations like athletic performance, where individuals feel pressure to succeed. The condition is characterized by a combination of mental and physical components, including worry, difficulty in reasoning, increased heart rate, and other symptoms associated with the fight-or-flight response.
Debates around test anxiety have intensified since the rise of high-stakes testing, particularly in the U.S., where concerns have been raised about the impact of such testing on students' ability to accurately demonstrate their knowledge. Research indicates that while a certain level of anxiety can enhance performance, excessive anxiety may hinder it. Test anxiety is distinct from trait anxiety, manifesting only in specific situations, and is linked to factors such as lower IQ, poor study skills, and external locus of control, with certain demographic groups reporting higher levels.
Interventions for managing test anxiety have evolved from early techniques focused solely on relaxation to more comprehensive approaches that combine anxiety reduction with academic preparation strategies. These methods aim to address both the fear associated with testing and the recognition of one’s preparedness for the task at hand.
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Test anxiety
Test anxiety, also known as evaluation anxiety, is a condition characterized by apprehension and distress in the context of a test or other evaluation. Although test anxiety is most commonly discussed with reference to school testing situations, the same principles can apply to athletic performance or any other occasion where a person feels threatened or pressured by the need to do well on a task. Some theorists differentiate between appropriate anxiety, which may occur when a person is not prepared to perform a task well, and anxiety that prevents a person from accessing learned information or behaviors they are normally capable of in a testing situation.
Overview
Although test anxiety has been studied since at least the 1950s, it gained much greater attention from researchers and the public alike with the growth of high-stakes academic testing in the United States and some other countries in the twenty-first century. Some educators argue that putting children into high-stress situations causes them unnecessary anxiety and interferes with their ability to accurately display their knowledge on the tests. However, scholars have debated the distinction between cause and effect in testing situations. Is poor test performance caused by anxiety, or is the experience of doing poorly on a test the cause of the anxiety?
Test anxiety is distinct from trait anxiety because it only occurs in particular circumstances. However, like trait anxiety, test anxiety is usually considered to have two components, one mental and one physical. The mental component, sometimes called worry, includes difficulty in reasoning and in recalling information, while the physical component includes aspects of the fight-or-flight response, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, which may interfere with cognitive processing. Some theorists also include a third component, social humiliation, meaning the fear of being negatively evaluated by others. Many studies of anxiety and performance have found that some anxiety may be necessary to perform one’s best, but too much anxiety may interfere with performance.
Most studies of test anxiety have been correlational—for instance, lower IQ has been found to correlate with higher test anxiety—so that it is not possible to say which factor causes the other, or if there is a causal relationship between them. High test anxiety has also been found to correlate with external locus of control (the feeling that events are cause by factors outside one’s personal control), poor study skills, being female, and being a member of a racial or ethnic minority group. Researchers continue to investigate and debate the implications of such findings.
Early interventions for test anxiety typically used techniques such as systematic desensitization, i.e., training a person to produce a relaxed rather than aroused response in the presence of a threatening stimulus (the test). However, often relaxation training reduced test anxiety while failing to improve test performance, and today many interventions combine anxiety reduction techniques with study techniques intended to raise academic performance. This approaches attacks both of the possible causes for anxiety—fear of the testing situation itself, and the accurate realization that one is not prepared for the test.
Bibliography
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