Sources of Test Anxiety: A Qualitative Approach

Abstract

Test anxiety comes as an irrefutable fact of education. Testing and being tested, whatever the level of education, is a natural source of concern. The intention of this study is to obtain data that will be the starting point for future intervention programs for test-anxiety. For the research, 10 middle school students and 10 high school students and semi-structured interview forms were interviewed. It has been seen that middle school students describe test anxiety with emotional symptoms and high school students with cognitive symptoms. While the anxiety of the test anxiety affects the life of the students and the influence of the family relations in the high school students is in the preliminary stage, the middle school students show themselves as negative thoughts about the future and the negative affect appears as a common theme in both groups. As sources of test anxiety, we see parents’ and teachers’ higher success expectations in both age groups. Besides, the words that parents’ and teachers’ motivational words the students cause them to worry more about not being the anticipated effect in the students. These negative attitudes cause an sense of over responsibility in students. According to the findings of the study, it is revealed that it is a great necessity for the parents and teachers to be involved in the intervention programs for the students who are experiencing the test anxiety.

Keywords: Text anxiety, high school students, secondary school students, source of text anxiety, qualitative research