Abstract
Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data for Italy, this paper offers a complete overview of the relationship between test anxiety and school performance by studying how anxiety affects the performance of students along the overall conditional distribution of mathematics, literature and science scores. We aim to indirectly measure whether higher goals increase test anxiety, starting from the hypothesis that high-skilled students generally set themselves high goals. We use an M-quantile regression approach that allows us to take into account the hierarchical structure and sampling weights of the PISA data. There is evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship between test anxiety and school performance. The size of the estimated association is greater at the upper tail of the distribution of each score than at the lower tail. Therefore, our results suggest that high-performing students are more affected than low-performing students by emotional reactions to tests and school-work anxiety.
Highlights
Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data for Italy, this paper offers a complete overview of the relationship between test anxiety and school performance by studying how anxiety affects the performance of students along the overall conditional distribution of mathematics, literature and science scores
At the centre of the outcome distribution (q 1⁄4 0:5) we observe higher values than those at the tails (q 1⁄4 0:1 andq 1⁄4 0:9) and the values of pseudo-R22 are higher than those of pseudoR21 at each quantile for all scores. This exploratory-correlational study conducted with data from PISA 2015 and based on the W-MQRE regression model proposed by Schirripa Spagnolo et al (2020) used student performance as the response variable and anxiety index as the main explanatory variable
Other individual and school characteristics are used as control factors in the econometric model. This analysis allows us to elucidate that anxiety plays a crucial role in test scores regardless of the specific area of study, and it negatively impacts individual performance
Summary
Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data for Italy, this paper offers a complete overview of the relationship between test anxiety and school performance by studying how anxiety affects the performance of students along the overall conditional distribution of mathematics, literature and science scores. Even if there are several empirical studies at the international level in this framework, the research in the field is mainly focused (albeit with some exceptions; see, for example, Satake and Amato (1995) or Ramirez et al (2013)) on assessing the effect of anxiety on math performance using standard regression approaches or simple hypothesis testing, with the findings valid mainly around the centre of the distribution of math scores. As a consequence, these findings do not allow us to distinguish the different degrees of association that test anxiety may have among high-performing and low-performing students
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