The Moderating Effects of Item Order Arranged by Difficulty on the Relationship between Test Anxiety and Test Performance

Huilin Chen

doi:10.4236/ce.2012.33052

Abstract

Taking cultural knowledge tests as the case study, this research carries out a series of empirical investigations to verify the moderating effects of item order arranged by difficulty on the relationship between test anxiety and test performance. Groups classified according to test anxiety take tests with two major types of item order: item order arranged according to item bank calibrated item difficulty and item order adjusted according to individual examinee’s perceived item difficulty. The means of those test results are compared between groups to see whether the differences are significant. The investigations obtain the following findings: the higher the test taker’s level of test anxiety, the higher significance of the moderating effects and vice versa; item order adjusted according to individual examinee’s perceived item difficulty may have a more significant moderating effect than item order arranged according to item bank calibrated item difficulty has.

Highlights

Test anxiety is an important research topic in the fields of educational and psychological measurement
Previous studies have not taken into consideration the collective effects of test anxiety and item order on test performance, and neglected the fact that there exists relationship between item order and test anxiety when item order or test anxiety is at the same time exerting influence on test performance
Most of the previous studies did not treat subjects with different levels of test anxiety separately so that they could not find the differential effects of item order on test performance for different test-anxious groups

Summary

Introduction

Test anxiety is an important research topic in the fields of educational and psychological measurement. Previous researches focused on the overall effect of test anxiety on test performance (Kunnan, 1995; Gao, 2008) and paid little attention to the moderating effects of third-party variables on the relationship between test anxiety and test performance. This research aims at exploring the moderating effects of item order arranged by difficulty on the relationship between test anxiety and test performance. The relationship between test anxiety and test performance is the focus of previous researches, no consensus has been reached. Many hold that the Yerkes-Dodson law can be applied to test anxiety and believe in that the relationship can be described in an inverted U shape curve. According to the Yerkesd-Dodson law, moderate level of anxiety can lead to optimal performance of certain tasks; performance can deteriorate when anxiety is too high or low. As test anxiety increases, performance is expected to decrease (Rocklin & Thompson, 1985; Bodas & Ollendick, 2005)

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion