Test Anxiety in Educational Contexts. Concepts, Findings, and Future Directions.

This chapter examines current and recurrent issues in test anxiety theory. Tests and evaluative situations have emerged as a potent class of stressors in Western society, which bases many important decisions relating to an individual's status in school, college, and work on tests and other assessment devices. Test anxiety is frequently cited among the pivotal factors at play in determining a wide array of unfavorable outcomes for students, including poor cognitive performance, scholastic underachievement, psychological distress, and ill health. In addition to taking its toll in human suffering and impaired test performance, test anxiety may also jeopardize assessment validity in the cognitive domain and constitute a major source of construct-irrelevant systematic variance in test scores (test bias). To the extent that anxiety influences performance in some substantial way, some examinees perform worse than their ability or achievement would otherwise allow. A student's performance on a classroom exam may be as much an indicator of the students' ability to cope with high levels of evaluative stress and anxiety in the classroom as a reflection of the ability or achievement the exam aims at measuring. Thus, the measurement of any particular ability or proficiency is confounded with anxiety. © 2007