Test anxiety is a combination of over-rousal physiological, tension and somatic symptoms, along with anxiety, fear, fear of failure, and catastrophization, which occurs before or during the test situation. This is a physiological condition in which people experience extreme stress, anxiety, and discomfort during and/or before taking the test. This anxiety creates significant barriers to learning and performance. Research shows that high levels of emotional stress have a direct correlation with decreased overall academic performance and higher student dropout rates. Anxiety tests can have wider consequences, which negatively affect the social, emotional and behavioral development of students, as well as their feelings about themselves and school.
Students who are very anxious test the score about 12 percentile points below their low anxiety level. Test anxiety is prevalent among the world's student populations. It has been formally studied since the early 1950s starting with researchers George Mandler and Seymour Sarason. His brother Sarason, Irwin G. Sarason, later contributed to an initial investigation of anxiety tests, clarifying the relationship between the focus effects of test anxiety, other forms of focused anxiety, and general anxiety.
Test anxiety can also be labeled as anticipatory anxiety, situational anxiety or evaluation anxiety. Some anxiety is normal and often helps to remain mentally and physically alert. When a person experiences too much anxiety, however, it can lead to emotional or physical stress, difficulty concentrating, and emotional worries. Lower performance appears not due to intellectual issues or poor academic preparation, but because the test situation creates a sense of threat to those who experience test anxiety; anxiety arising from a sense of threat then disrupts the attention and function of memory. Researchers show that between 25 and 40 percent of students experience test anxiety. Students with disabilities and students in gifted education classes are likely to experience high levels of test anxiety. Students who experience anxiety tests tend to be easily distracted during tests, have difficulty with understanding relatively simple instructions, and difficulty regulating or recalling relevant information.
Video Test anxiety
Signs and symptoms
Researchers believe that feelings of anxiety appear to prepare a person for threats. In humans, anxiety symptoms are distributed along the continuum and levels of anxiety symptoms predict different outcomes. The response consists of an increase in heart rate, stress hormone secretion, anxiety, alertness, and fear of potentially dangerous environments. Anxiety prepares the body physically, cognitively, and behaviorally to detect and face the threat of survival. As a result, one's body begins to hyperventilate to allow more oxygen into the bloodstream, divert blood to the muscles, and sweat to cool the skin. In individuals, the extent to which anxiety responses are developed is based on the possibility of bad things happening in the environment and the ability of individuals to overcome them. In the case of an exam, this may be the value of a failed exam that prevents students from being admitted to post-secondary institutions. One's belief in their own competence is a form of self-knowledge, which plays an important role in analyzing situations that may be threatening. When a person has a low sense of competence about their abilities, they tend to anticipate negative outcomes such as failure, under uncertain conditions. Thus, evaluative situations including tests and exams, considered more threatening by students with low competence.
There is a difference between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and test anxiety. GAD is characterized by "anxiety" which results in a person experiencing high levels of stress in various situations. In contrast, people with test anxiety have "state anxiety" which results in a high level of anxiety specific to testing.
Symptoms of test anxiety can range from moderate to severe. "Students who show symptoms are still able to perform relatively well at the exam Other students with severe anxiety will often experience panic attacks."
Common physical symptoms include: headache, abdominal pain, fear, fear, shortness of breath, sweating, pacing or anxiety, crying, spurting thoughts and emptying.
During a state of excitement or stress, the body releases adrenaline. Adrenaline is known to cause physical symptoms that accompany test anxiety, such as increased heart rate, sweating, and rapid breathing. In many cases having adrenaline is a good thing. It helps when faced with a stressful situation, ensuring awareness and preparation. But for some people, symptoms are difficult or impossible to handle, making it impossible to focus on the test.
Anxiety tests consist of:
- Physiological overarousal - often termed emotionality . Somatic signs include headache, abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, dizziness or fainting, rapid heartbeat and dry mouth. Anxiety tests can also lead to panic attacks, where students may have sudden intense fear, difficulty breathing, and extreme discomfort.
- Worry and fear - maladaptive cognition. This includes hopes of gloom and disaster, fear of failure, random thoughts, feelings of inadequacy, self-condemnation, negative self-talk, frustration and self-comparison with others.
- Cognitive/Behavior - poor concentration, "empty" or "freeze," confusion, and bad organization. Inability to concentrate leads to performance impairment on the test. Anxious during or away from the exam. Students often report "emptying" even though they have learned enough for the test.
- Emotional - low self-esteem, depression, anger, and feelings of despair.
Maps Test anxiety
Cause
Research shows that parental pressure is associated with greater anxiety, irrelevant mind tests, and stronger body symptoms related to anxiety during tests.
Other causes of test anxiety may include fear of failures, delays, and poor previous test performance. In addition, the characteristics of test environments such as: the nature of the task, the difficulty, the atmosphere, the time constraints, the characteristics of the examiner, the mode of administration and the physical arrangement may affect the level of anxiety felt by the student. Putwain & amp; Best (2011), tested test performance among elementary schoolchildren when teachers put pressure on students in an effort to create a higher stress environment. Their findings indicate that students perform poorly in high-threat situations and experience more alarming anxiety and thought than when in a low-threat environment.
Test anxiety is known to develop into a vicious cycle. After having an anxiety test on one test, students can become so afraid of it happening again they become more anxious and angry than usual, or even from what they experienced in the previous test. If the cycle continues without recognition, or students seek help, students may begin to feel helpless in the situation.
People who experience anxiety tests often have parents or siblings who have anxiety tests or other types of anxiety. Anxiety seems to have some genetic component.
Diagnosis
Anxiety tests can be diagnosed using the Manual-IV Diagnostic and Statistics, under the classification of social phobia. Social phobia is characterized by a marked and persistent fear of social situations or performance in which shyness may occur . To be diagnosed with social phobia, DSM-IV states that the individual must present four different factors.
- Should show an immediate anxiety response when exposed to a dreaded social or performance situation.
- Should point out various attempts to avoid social situations or performance, or sometimes withhold them but with great fear.
- Should be disrupted by normal activity due to avoidance or fear associated with the situation
- Must experience symptoms for at least six months.
Other variables associated with anxiety tests are:
- Obsessive compulsive disorder
- Unrealistic perfectionist tendencies and expectations
- Negative self-esteem, self-assertion, and criticism
- Poor motivation or lack of confidence
- Stereotyped threats
- Inadequate learning and exam skills
- Habits of eating, sleeping, and exercising are bad
Theory
Anxiety is defined as "the psychological mechanism by which the current intensification of dangerous drives results in defense elicitation." George Mandler and Seymour Sarason (1952), developed the theory that the anxiety that exists in the test situation is a critical determinant of test performance. Individuals who become very anxious during tests usually perform worse on tests than those who are anxiously low-test, especially when tests are administered under stressful evaluative conditions such as post-secondary exams. Feeling forgotten, or drawing "empty" is developed because of an anxiety-generated disturbance between the relevant response and the irrelevant response resulting from the person's anxious state. The differences in the performance of a highly anxious test taker compared to the low-anxiety test participants are largely due to their differing ability to focus on the tasks required. A low-anxiety worm can focus greater attention on the tasks required of them while taking the test, while the very anxious test takers are focused on their internal self, and the anxiety they feel. The anxious test participants did not perform an adequate test because their attention was shared between them and the test. Therefore, students with high test anxiety can not focus their full attention on the test. Furthermore, anxiety arises when a student believes that the evaluative situation, such as judgment, exceeds his or her intellectual, motivational, and social abilities.
Psychologists Liebert and Morris (1967) analyzed the structure of test anxiety given on two different factors: Cognitive Trauma Anxiety and Emotionality . Emotionality means that individuals show high rates of some of the different symptoms associated with experimental anxiety that can be seen through the physiological responses experienced during the situations in which they are evaluated; like an exam. Some physiological manifestations include: increased galvanic skin response and heart rate, dizziness, nausea, or panic. There is evidence that emotionality is a different part of anxiety tests; However, it can be seen that when an individual exhibits high emotionality it means that it is mostly related to performance degradation, but only when the individual also experiences high levels of anxiety.
Another factor mentioned is the Anxiety Cognitive Test , also known as worry. This is largely composed of individual cognitive reactions to situations in which they are being evaluated, at a time before, during, and after such tasks. Some thought that individuals with high cognitive test anxiety are constantly dealing with comparing self-performance with peers, considering the consequences of failure, low levels of confidence in performance, excessive worries about value, feeling that they are not ready for tests, and loss. pride.
Putwain, Woods & amp; Symes (2010), found that low academic self-concept is associated with higher anxiety and tension about their ability to perform tests well. Metacognitive beliefs of a student play an important role in maintaining negative self-confidence.
Anxiety reactions can be generalized from previous experience to test situations. Feelings of inadequacy, helplessness, anticipation of punishment or loss of status and price embody anxiety response. In addition, audience attendance may weaken the performance of anxious test takers and improve the performance of low-anxiety test participants. Interestingly, people who score high on anxiety scale tend to describe themselves negatively and self-evaluate. The highly anxious test takers also blame themselves for their failings significantly more than just the low-anxiety test takers.
The study of the relationship between anxiety and performance can be understood by using the Jerkes-Dodson's Law, where one can see the facilitation effect and weaken from the passion on performance as an inverted "U". An example of this correlation can be seen in the case of a child taking a test where the level of passion or anxiety that children describe can be seen as beneficial to performance. Although, if the child does not have feelings or fears or failures or some kind of impulse to do a good test, then the child is unlikely to make the necessary effort in preparing or motivated when taking the test and he or she will not perform optimally.
However, if before or during child anxiety tests are above the optimal level, they may also fail to demonstrate their true abilities. In these circumstances, the fear of an actual exam may disrupt preparation and cause a great deal of stress during tests that will likely undermine their performance.
Attention Theory
There are two main groups of attention theories attempt to explain the compromised performance in stressful situations.
One group of theories is explicit monitoring theory . They claim that when a person is expected to perform certain skills, pressure can lead to increased self-awareness and inward focus, which can interfere with their ability to successfully perform the task. Thinking about a step-by-step procedure may hinder a person's ability to perform a task. For example, a study by R. Gray found that baseball players who put in high-pressure conditions experienced an increase in errors, and increased ability to remember details like the direction their batter moves. This shows that the pressed players monitor themselves more, which affects their ability to successfully hit the ball.
The second group of theories is the fault theory . These theories suggest that high-pressure environments create multiple task situations, where people's attention is shared between unhelpful tasks and thoughts about the situation and the possible negative consequences of poor performance. Attention is an important part of working memory, which is a system that actively holds some relevant piece of information in the mind while retarding irrelevant information. Working memory has limited capacity, and the addition of stress and anxiety reduces available resources to focus on relevant information.
In situations where individuals need to focus their attention on a specific task, emotional stimulation can divert their attention to a greater extent than non-emotional stimulation. Emotional stimulation often dominates one's mind, and any attempt to suppress it will require additional working memory resources. When working memory divides resources between hostile cognition and material relevant to the task, then a person's ability to use relevant information on a test will suffer.
People who suffer from anxiety tests are more likely to experience negative cognition when in an evaluative situation. Furthermore, anxious people's tests have found their attention bias towards threatening stimuli and related anxiety over non-emotional stimuli.
Research has found that the task that relies heavily on working memory is the task that suffers most during stress. The shortcomings in performance caused by test anxiety seem to be related to the extent to which students have full access to their working memory.
When comparing these two theories in the context of academic performance, the majority of the work supports the theory of disorder. One reason is that many of the skills performed in the classroom demand heavy demands on working memory. However, there are different types of stress situations. There is pressure monitoring , in which individual performance is affected due to audience attendance, and yield pressure , in which individual performance is affected by the consequences of the test results. In one study, DeCaro et al. found that performance on a rule-based task, which relies heavily on working memory, is disrupted by yield pressure, but does not monitor pressure, while performance on task information integration, which does not require attention control, is hurt by monitoring pressure, but not pressure results. These findings suggest that performance is compromised in different ways depending on the type of task, and the types of pressure, and that both theories can be true.
Attention control
Eysenck et al. describes the theory of disorder and proposes the theory of attention control. This theory uses the Baddeley memory work model to explain the effects of anxiety on memory work and performance. In Baddeley theory, working memory (WM) consists of four components, one central executive who has a number of tasks such as temporary storage coordination of phonological and visual information (phonological loops and visuospatial sketches, respectively).
Attention-control theory assumes that anxiety primarily affects attention control, which is a key function of central executives. Attention control is the balance between two systems of attention, a purpose-directed system, influenced by individual goals, and stimulus-driven systems, influenced by prominent stimuli. According to the theory of attention control, anxiety disrupts the balance between the two systems. The stimulus-driven system becomes stronger at the expense of a goal-directed system, thus interfering with the inhibitory efficiency and shifting of central executive functions.
To support this theory, there is strong evidence that anxiety largely impairs processing efficiency rather than performance effectiveness. Performance effectiveness refers to the quality of performance while processing efficiency refers to the amount of resources used to achieve effective performance. There is also evidence that anxiety undermines inhibition and shift function. Therefore, this theory suggests that students who are high in test anxiety should allocate more resources to the task at hand than an anxiety student who does not test to achieve the same result.
In general, people with higher working memory capacity perform better on academic tasks, but this changes when people are under acute pressure. Sian Beilock et al. found that pressure causes individuals with high working memory capacity to work worse on complex tasks, whereas individuals with low WM capacity get the same low yield with or without pressure. This is because people with high WM may use better but more demanding troubleshooting strategies under low-pressure conditions, which they must leave under high-pressure conditions. Low WM people never use this demanding strategy in the first place. Evidence for similar working memory effects in children has also been found. Evidence that anxiety properties may have different effects on working memory rather than the state of stress or acute originates from Johnson et al. that found individual performance on a task showed decreased accuracy due to anxiety properties for individuals with low or average WM capacity but not significantly decreased for individuals with high WM.
Measurement scale
The initial scale, by writers such as Charles Spielberger, tends to focus on physiological and somatic features and worry, commonly referred to as emotionality , while newer offers, such as those by Cassady & Johnson, emphasizes cognitive processes. The "anxiety test" for these authors consists of physiological and mental processes, and the performance of disturbed tests is seen as a result.
The Child Anxiety Anxiety Test is specifically designed to measure test anxiety in children aged 8-12 years. It gives scores for three dimensions of test anxiety: "worrying thoughts about failure (ie 'when I take the test, I'm worried about failing'), automatic reactions to general students and somatic specifics of anxiety indications (ie 'when I take the test, my heart beats fast '), and off-task behavior about nervous habits and disruptive behavior (ie' when I do a test, I play with my pencil ') "
The Test Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescent (TAICA) is a way to measure and assess anxiety tests on children and adolescents in Grade 4 through 12. Those who are being assessed assess their responses at 5-point Likert -type scale starting from 1 (never true about me) up to 5 (always right about me). The TAICA is a 45-item self-report size consisting of four sub-scales.
- Cognitive obstruction/Infertility subscale assesses memory difficulties and attention and cognition impeded with anxiety related tests
- Physiological Hyperarousal subscale measures physical symptoms associated with the test-taking process.
- Social degradation of feared subscale actions associated with test failure and belittled or ridiculed by significant others
- The worms subscale assesses negative thoughts and concerns that adversely affect test performance.
Treatment
Medication will not cure anxiety disorders but will keep them under control. Treatment of drugs for anxiety disorders works by minimizing the mechanism of detecting threats in the body.
- Beta blocker - commonly used to treat performance anxiety. Propranolol (beta blocker) blocks the physical manifestation of anxiety. It slows the heart rate and reduces perspiration. It should not be taken for the first time on a test day, as some people are shown to have side effects that include, but are not limited to, dizziness and very slow heartbeats.
- Benzodiazepines - Usually used to treat anxiety tests. Must be taken up to 30 minutes before the start of the test. Side effects include, but are not limited to, drowsiness and may interfere with memory and mind.
- Antidepressants - commonly used for generalized depression, which may accompany test anxiety. Side effects include, but are not limited to, the potential to cause anxiety and suicidal thoughts. This should be done regularly not when needed before the exam.
Another approach is the use of psychotherapy . Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is very useful in treating anxiety disorders. CBT helps change thinking patterns that support fear and help people overcome negative beliefs. CBT often lasts about two weeks and occurs in small groups.
Drugs that are combined with psychotherapy have proven to be the most effective treatment approach for people suffering from anxiety disorders.
Cognitive intervention has only limited results when it comes to improving test performance. Some cognitive strategies have even proven to be detrimental to performance, especially strategies such as emphasis on thinking One of the promising interventions of results in the first study was the "cognitive bias modification of attention" in which children learn to avoid noticing threatening faces.
It has been shown that students seem to be trying to treat the anxiety of their cognitive tests and their negative consequences with the help of prescription prescription drugs. This type of self-medication has been interpreted as a coping strategy to reduce cognitive or deficit inference and to prevent subjective states of pressure and negative performance outcomes.
Management
To get an accurate assessment of students' understanding, the instructor should be concerned with minimizing the effects of test anxiety. Instructors may offer a "second chance" post test, familiarize students with test formats and scoring schemes, and reduce the impact of a test. If students have greater confidence in their test taking skills, they are more likely to feel comfortable and relax when testing actually occurs. Having a deliberate thinking strategy will help improve student performance.
For some individuals, poor academic performance is caused by skill deficits, which may include problems in coding (learning), training (learning skills) or taking during a test (test-taking strategy). Skill deficits can lead to poor performance directly (failure to learn the material adequately) or indirectly (consciousness being the cause of unattended anxiety which, in turn, leads to poor performance). Therefore, the most effective intervention is that combining skill-focused strategies (ie, learning skills training, cognitive skills) with cognitive (ie cognitive restructuring) or behavioral approaches (ie relaxation training, systematic desensitization).
Research shows that students do not earn as much from reading self-help materials as students would from the same material received in therapy or in participatory group settings.
See also
- Fear of negative evaluation
- Mathematical anxiety
- Anxiety disorder
- Social anxiety
- Social anxiety disorder
- Fever stage
- Camera shy
- Category: Shyness
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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