Test anxiety and the contents of consciousness: Thought-listing and endorsement measures

Abstract

This study examined self-reported thoughts and feelings of high, moderate, and low test-anxious college students by means of unstructured and structured techniques. Measures of retrospective thought listings, pretest performance expectancies, actual test performance, post-test performance evaluations, and post-test measures of cognitive interference and physiological interference were obtained throughout an analog testing situation. Analyses of unstructured self-reports indicated that high test-anxious students, relative to moderate and low, reported a higher ratio of negative thoughts about themselves and a lower ratio of positive thoughts about the test. Analyses of structured self-reports indicated that high test-anxious students reported more cognitively interfering thoughts and mind wandering during the anagram test. Moreover, while high test-anxious students endorsed more thoughts concerned with physiological activation on the structured measure, inspection of thought listings revealed only one statement regarding physiological sensations. Finally, while anxiety groups did not differ significantly in pretest expectancies or actual test performance, high test-anxious students believed that they performed less successfully than students with less test anxiety. The findings illustrate that low test anxiety is not simply the opposite of high test anxiety and that perception of aversive physiological activity is not a salient component of test-anxious students' contents of consciousness. The results are interpreted as evidence for the usefulness of thought-listing assessments that classify thoughts on the basis of negative self-focused and task-facilitative thinking.