Andrés Barragán Campos

Academic Paper on Test Anxiety

Introduction:
Anxiety is a body’s natural response to stress. It’s a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s
to come. The first day of school, going to a job interview, or giving a speech may cause most
people to feel fearful and nervous. On this paper I going to replicate a study (“Test Anxiety and
Academic Performance: The Effects of Study-Related Behaviors”, Ralph E. Culler and Charles
J. Holahan) that investigated the relationship between test anxiety an academic performance in
college students. The main results found are that high-test anxious students not only had a
decrease in grade point average but also had a lower study quality. Whereas low test anxious
students have a better management of study and have less impact on their grade point
average. This led me to conclude that there is a correlation between anxiety and lower grade
point average. In this academic paper i am going to replicate the investigation by creating a 10
Item form (the questions were taken from: “Test anxiety scale: reliability among Ethiopian
students”, P. MOHAN RAJU, MISGANAW MESFIN, AND ESA ALIA) and passing it to 14
college students and then see if I get some results that confirms the main article’s theory on test
anxiety and academic performance.

Methods:
In order to get an objective point of view, I have created a google form with 10 items, taken from
the second article mentioned in the introduction, that i thought that were the easier to
understand for non-English speakers. The form was filled by 14 students and i also asked them
to write down their average grade point.

Once the forms were completed, the results were gathered in an Excel spreadsheet. I have
calculated the Total Points per students and have also done the mean of each Item, the typical
deviation and Pearson´s correlation coefficient (The results will be analyzed in the next
paragraph).
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Results
Once the results were introduced in an Excel table, we can notice many things. On the one
hand we can clearly see a correlation between the total points obtained in the 10-item test and
the average GPA. As a reminder, the higher score a student gets, the more test anxiety he/she
presents. Therefore, we can clearly notice from our results that the higher the score is, the lower
the average grade point will be. The mean row allows us to see the average results and we can
notice that those who score higher than the mean have more anxiety and lower marks and
those who score lower than the average tend to be less anxious and have higher marks.

The Pearson’s correlation indicates the correlation there is between one item and the variable
we have (in this case anxiety). If r>0.2, the item correlates with the variable and that means that
it will predict very well the test anxiety factor. We can see from the excel table that almost all
items correlate very well except the item 5. This can happen when the question asked is not
clear, the subjects don’t understand it well or when they don’t relate to the situation. In our case
the statement asked for item 5 is: “On exams I take the attitude, “If I don’t know it now, there’s
no point in worrying about it.””. The correlation result that we get is r=-0.407, this means that not
many people related to this situation and it won’t be a good anxiety predictor. If I had to do a
final paper, I would erase this Item in order to make my test as valid and reliable as possible.

We can clearly see on this graph the effect this item had in our subjects. Almost two quarters
answered “Sometimes”, more than another quarter answered “Hardly never” and the last
quarter answered either “often” and “always”. Taking in consideration that our objective is to
measure whether our subjects tend to be anxious or calm, we can see that this Item is not that
relevant.

Discussion
Going back to the article’s hypothesis that argues if test anxiety has an effect on the average
grade points and based on the results obtained, we can say that it is indeed a good predictor.
The student number 12 has the lowest result in our test (15) and appears to have the highest
GPA (8.7) whereas the student number 1 has the highest result in our test (42) and appears to
have the lowest GPA (6.2). We can see the same pattern with the results obtained by the other
students with some exceptions in the case where the anxiety test has the same results between
students but the average GPA varies. This is due to the fact that even if two students have the
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same anxiety results, one might have studied more and he/she would therefore obtain a higher
result. In order to be more precise in our study we would have to include many external factors
such as the amount of study time per week, the number of missed class, if the student is
practicing an external activity that occupies a lot of his time etc. All in all, we can conclude that
even though our subject number is limited and there are many external factors that weren’t
taken into consideration, we can have a global idea and agree on the main article published by
Ralph E. Culler and Charles J. Holahan that investigated about Test anxiety and Academic
performance.

Bibliography
 “Test Anxiety and Academic Performance: The Effects of Study-Related Behaviors”,
Ralph E. Culler and Charles J. Holahan. Journal of Educational Psychology 1980, Vol. 72,
No. 1,16-20
 Tryon, G. S. (1980). The Measurement and Treatment of Test Anxiety. Review of
Educational Research, 50(2), 343–372.
 FRANSSON, A. (1977), ON QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING: IV—
EFFECTS OF INTRINSIC MOTIVATION AND EXTRINSIC TEST ANXIETY ON
PROCESS AND OUTCOME. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 47: 244-
257.
Going back to the article’s hypothesis that argues if test anxiety has an effect on the
average grade points and based on the results obtained, we can say that it is indeed a
good predictor. The student number 12 has the lowest result in our test (15) and
appears to have the highest GPA (8.7) whereas the student number 1 has the highest
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Anxiety Level

Anxiety level Test results Column1