Information Integration Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Face-to-Face or Online Statistics Test Anxiety Judgments of Engineering Students

Guadalupe Elizabeth Morales-Martinez,Yanko Norberto Mezquita-Hoyos,David Jose Charles-Cavazos,Maria Isolde Hedlefs-Aguilar,Angel Garcia-Collantes

doi:10.12973/eu-jer.10.1.23

Abstract

<p style="text-align:justify">This study examined information integration cognitive mechanisms underlying the test anxiety judgments of 474 engineering students. The experimental design considered the orthogonal combination of three factors (teaching style, exam type, and test mode), resulting in 12 experimental scenarios. During the experiments, participants were provided one scenario at a time and were asked to rate their anticipated anxiety level in the described situation. Subsequent analyses failed to reveal statistically significant differences in the anxiety levels reported by females and males. However, the factor selection and valuation female students adopted to make their anxiety judgments differed from those employed by their male peers. Cluster analysis identified three groups based on the anxiety level (low, medium, and high). The most relevant factor for all clusters was test mode, and only the medium anxiety group considered a second factor (exam type) to make their anxiety judgments, which was integrated through an additive cognitive rule. These findings suggest that participants place a higher weight on the examination context than its type when making their test anxiety judgments. Identifying these cognitive mechanisms underlying test anxiety could help regulate conditions that undermine the students' ability to cope with test anxiety.</p>

Highlights

Exams are an inevitable aspect of students' life, as success or failure could have profound implications for their personal and professional development
These findings do not align with the results reported by Deloatch et al (2016) and Kolagari et al (2018) who found non-significant differences in the test anxiety levels produced by different test modes
The study results revealed that three modes of thinking underlie test anxiety and manifest differently depending on gender or anxiety level

Summary

Introduction

Exams are an inevitable aspect of students' life, as success or failure could have profound implications for their personal and professional development. Formal evaluations can produce a wide variety of reactions among students, including working hard to obtain praise, fear immobilization, worries about meeting others' expectations (Malloy, 2016; Peleg et al, 2016; Putwain et al, 2010; Sarason & Sarason, 1990), and concerns about anticipated faults (Flett & Blankstein, 1994). These experiences, separately or together, sometimes contribute to increase the test anxiety degree. It is worrisome that nearly 7−25% of students suffer very high levels of test anxiety (Bhuvaneswari, 2020; Thomas et al, 2017)

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