Test Anxiety

Mandler and Sarason ( 1952) pioneered in the development of an anxiety scale designed specifically to measure test anxiety in children. Unlike the manifestanxiety scale, it refers specifically to school-relevant evaluation situations such as those an elementary school child would encounter. The manifestations of anxiety to which it refers are much the same, however: nightmares about tomorrow's test, fear of being called on, trembling of hands when taking a test, lack of confidence in one's school performance, unhappiness about being evaluated, fear that one will fail and be scolded by the teacher or by one's parents, nd so on. This scale, the test-anxiety scale for children, has been validated extensively, and has undergone various revisions in the hands of others.

Evaluative anxiety is, in most respects, synonymous with the construct of test anxiety which Mandler and Sarason introduced in 1952 and defined operationally with the test-anxiety scale, and later with the test-anxiety scale for children. Since many operational definitions in addition to the test-anxiety scale have been employed in the research reported in this book, it seemed advisable to use the term "evaluative anxiety" rather than "test anxiety."

Although evaluative anxiety is a form of general anxiety, the overlap between test or evaluative anxiety and general anxiety is not great enough to make the two concepts synonymous. Significant positive correlations usually are found between measures of test and general anxiety, such as the test-anxiety scale and the general-anxiety scale. However, although correlations between measures of test anxiety and test performance generally are significant, correlations between measures of general anxiety and test performance generally are not.

The different ways of identifying or defining test anxiety provide alternative approaches to answering the other questions that have been raised here. Anxiety is an emotional process which has several components. Since each component contributes to the definition of anxiety, it is useful for our purposes to specify these components and then to show how each may be used to define anxiety.

Test anxiety typically is defined as a state of worry and emotionality about the evaluation of one's performance. When persons are highly anxious, they tend to exaggerate and personalize the threat of evaluation inherent in any situation. Indeed, high-anxious individuals are set to search out cues that they can interpret as meaning that they may be evaluated negatively. Then, in response to the perceived threat, the high-anxious person engages in selfabsorbing activities that interfere with performance on the task at hand.

A frequently used operational definition of anxiety consists of persons' own reports on their experiential states concerning evaluation. Test anxiety scales have assessed the following five kinds of conscious experience: (1) worry within n evaluative situation ("During tests I find myself thinking of the consequences of failing"); (2) worry owing to anticipation of, or reflection on, an evaluative situation that occurs at some other time ("I dread courses in which the professor gives surprise quizzes"); (3) nightmares about evaluation ("I sometimes have nightmares the night before a big test").

Some specific components of task performance, such as short-term memory, deployment of attention, incidental learning, and divergent thinking, are also affected by anxiety. Consequently, these cognitive variables are useful in defining the construct of test anxiety. Furthermore, an understanding of the effect of test anxiety on these cognitive processes is essential to the development of certain kinds of treatments aimed at reducing the undesirable effects of anxiety on performance, as we shall discuss subsequently. However, many of these effects are not reliable enough to serve as operational definitions of anxiety.