Abstract
Spielberger’s State-Trait Anxiety Model makes a theoretical distinction between the contribution of dispositional anxiety and the transitory experience of anxiety to performance difficulties during testing situations. According to the State-Trait framework, state anxiety is viewed as the primary performance barrier for test-anxious students, and as such, educators and educational researchers have expressed interest in validated, state anxiety measurement tools. Currently, the most widely used measure of state anxiety is the state version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. However, evidence regarding the psychometric properties of this scale is relatively scarce. Therefore, the current study was designed to determine the structural validity, reliability, and concurrent/divergent validity of the instrument. Participants ( N = 294) completed the state version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale 2nd Edition, and an exam task. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we tested the viability of one-, two-, and bi-factor solutions for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Confirmatory factor analysis results indicated a two-factor solution consisting of State Anxiety and State Calmness dimensions provided superior fit to the observed data. Results of a reliability analysis indicated that the State Anxiety and State Calmness factors demonstrated excellent internal consistency when applied to university students. Our discussion concerns the utility of the State Anxiety factor as a tool for the identification of test-anxious students.
Highlights
Test anxiety is a well-documented phenomenon that influences the academic performance of learners at all educational levels (Cassady & Johnson, 2002; Hembree, 1988; von der Embse et al, 2018)
Educational research has identified numerous factors that contribute to individual differences in the experience of test anxiety, process-oriented models emphasize that the most proximal determinant of performance decrements among test-anxious students is the experience of elevated levels of state anxiety (Zeidner, 1998)
The primary proposition in this framework is that the debilitative influence of anxiety on academic performance can be understood by recognizing an individual’s dispositional tendency to anxiety generally and the severity of anxiety experienced during specific evaluative events, which is more variable across settings and time frames
Summary
Participants reported how well each of the presented statements described how they were feeling in the present moment using a 4-point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all, 4 = very much so). Participants in the current investigation reported how well each of the presented mood terms described their feelings in the present moment using a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely). Participant’s general tendency to view evaluative situations as threatening was assessed using the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale-2nd edition (CTAS-2; Thomas et al, 2018). Participants reported how well each of the presented statements describes their typical reactions to evaluative situations using a 4-point Likert-type scale (1 = not at all like me, 4 = very much like me). The math and word problems were adapted from stimuli used in other investigations of the predictors and antecedents of academic anxieties (Park et al, 2014; Thomas & Cassady, 2020)
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