Test anxiety unveiled. Test Anxiety: The State of the Art. Moshe Zeidner. Plenum, New York, 1998. 440+xxi pages.
✍ Scribed by Henri C. Schouwenburg
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 65 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0890-2070
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In a civilization in which any person with a sucient level of intelligence can obtain higher education, universities have become populated with students who are generally comparable in, at least, minimal requirements of ability. Yet, success is not guaranteed. Study problems in areas other than aptitude have recently become important both for students and for student counsellors: lack of proper study motivation, procrastination of study tasks, and test anxiety have become major impediments to studying successfully.
As a re¯ection of this shift in problem area, educational psychology has begun to pay wider attention to individual dierences among learners with respect to motivational issues. Recently, Ferrari Johnson and McCown (1995) published a comprehensive monograph on procrastination, presently followed by Zeidner's scholarly text on test anxiety. According to Zeidner, test anxiety refers to the individual's disposition to react with extensive worry, intrusive thoughts, mental disorganisation, tension, and physiological arousal when exposed to evaluative situations. When experienced at high levels, test anxiety may result in impaired test performance and psychological distress. Although most people in modern society will experience some degree of test anxiety, in student populations, for example in college, some 15 to 20 per cent of students are reported to suer from relatively high levels of test anxiety.
Test anxiety research has developed in several stages. The ®rst empirical studies, beginning with the work of Folin, Demis and Smilie in 1914, simply inferred test anxiety from physiological reactions that examinees experienced during ego-threatening exams administered under evaluative conditions. In 1938, Brown called attention to the seriousness of the problem of test anxiety for college students, and published a ®rst psychometric scale for identifying high-risk test-anxious students. The second stage began in the early 1950s, when Mandler and Sarason initiated a research program into the eects of test anxiety on academic performance. They constructed a ®rst self-report measure of test anxiety, the Test Anxiety Questionnaire, and demonstrated decrements on learning and ability task performance in highly test-anxious students. In addition, they identi®ed both a cognitive and an aective component in test anxiety. During the 1960s, further conceptional distinctions were introduced. Spielberger distinguished state versus trait test anxiety and Alpert and Haber dierentiated between facilitating and debilitating test anxiety. The former type of test anxiety was regarded as more or less bene®cial to academic performance, while the latter type was identi®ed as the more problematic form of test anxiety. A third distinction was introduced by Liebert and Morris. In their conceptualization, test anxiety was viewed as a bidimensional phenomenon, including an empirically distinct, yet correlated, cognitive (worry) and an aective (emotionality) component. It seemed to be the worry component that related more strongly to test performance than did emotionality. This distinction shifted test anxiety theory and research toward a more cognitive orientation, which culminated in the early 1970s in Wine's model to account for the impact of test anxiety upon performance. According to this `cognitive±attentional or interference' model, test-anxious persons divide their attention during examinations between taskrelevant activities, on one hand, and task-irrelevant cognitive activities, such as preoccupations CCC 0890±2070/99/040327±03$17.50