Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">Anxiety that students experience during test taking negatively influences their academic achievement. Understanding how students perceive tests and how they feel during test taking could help in taking effective preventive measures. Hence, the current study focused on assessing children’s perceptions of tests using content analysis. The sample consisted of 1143 participants (566 females and 570 males) attending 3rd (n = 320), 4th (n = 420), 5th (n = 197), and 6th (n = 206) grade classes in three public schools in Istanbul, Turkey. The findings indicated that three main domains emerged from the data. The domains and the categories under each domain were as follows: evaluation (grades, success vs. failure, learning and development, and intelligence), emotions (excitement, fear and anxiety, happiness, curiosity, mixed feelings, and disappointment), and experiential process (answering questions, studying, difficulty, thinking, having fun, cheating vs. honesty, and silence). Understanding students’ experiences with testing early on in their education will give researchers and practitioners the chance to plan effective applications for treatment and prevention, which would influence students’ future achievement and experiences. The study findings could also help teachers and school counselors plan more effective teaching and counseling programs that take into account students’ anxiety levels during tests.</p>
Highlights
Tests continue to have a large place in the educational system
Understanding how children perceive tests and how they feel during test taking could help prevent and better intervene with issues related to test anxiety
Considering Turkish students’ low achievement in mathematics and science fields in international tests (Education Reform Initiative, 2014), it is important to focus on understanding how students perceive tests and how they feel during test taking in order to take effective preventive measures
Summary
Tests continue to have a large place in the educational system. considering the Turkish educational system, in which students have to take national exams that identify their subsequent schooling and future job opportunities, tests could be anxiety provoking. Research findings indicated that language anxiety has harmful effects on grade and performance levels of students (Philipps, 1992). Research demonstrated that test anxiety leads to motivational difficulties; thereby, has negative influence on performance (Hill & Eaton, 1977). Individuals with test anxiety experience motivational problems; perform poorly on exams. Tobias (1985) argued that test anxiety reduces cognitive capacity available for solution of tasks by interfering with the retrieval of prior learning and leads to poor performance. Research findings support that children with test anxiety have low level of motivation to learn and tend to perform poorly in environments they perceived to be competitive (Hancock, 2001). Students with test anxiety might be under the threat of depression in that
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