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Test anxiety in children has long been recognised to be a significant and challenging educational problem. Recent advances in diagnostic interviewing, cognitive assessment, and physiological recording have facilitated a considerable amount of research on test-anxious youth. This research has yielded important clinical insights about test-anxious children and adolescents of interest to teachers and psychologists. We describe and evaluate the findings of these investigations. Finally, we discuss the implications of the research findings for intervention in school settings. Cognitive-behavioural strategies are tentatively recommended for the treatment of test-anxious children and adolescents.
Test anxiety has been defined as an unpleasant emotional state or feeling, with cognitive, physiological, and behavioural referents, that is experienced before, during, and after examinations and other evaluative situations (Beidel & Turner, 1988; Sarason, 1975; Wine, 1971, 1979). Various studies have shown that test-anxious youth are more likely to receive poor grades, repeat a grade, and perform more poorly under evaluative situations than nontest-anxious youth (Beidel & Turner, 1988; Hembree, 1988), even though they may be of comparable intellectual ability.
Estimates of the prevalence of test anxiety among school-aged children and adolescents vary enormously. Based on treatment studies with American youth, Johnson (1979) estimated that test anxiety occurs in approximately 10% to 30% of students. However, as noted by Morris, Kratochwill, and Aldridge (1988), the actual proportion of students with severe test anxiety may be much less. In fact, Miller and his colleagues indicated that 1.5% of school-aged children express extreme fear of tests (Miller, Barrett, & Hampe, 1974). In our own research on the fears of American and Australian children and adolescents, we found an age-related increase in self-reports of fear relating to test items (King et al., 1989; Ollendick, King, & Frary, 1989). We speculated that this trend parallels the increased exposure to tests in school years. In relation to gender, girls usually report higher levels of test anxiety than boys (e.g., Douglas & Rice, 1979; Gjesme, 1982). Cultural differences in test anxiety or social-evaluation fears have also been detected by researchers (Ollendick, Yang, King, Dong, & Akande, 1996; Sharma, Parisian, & Spielberger, 1983).
Most theories of test anxiety emphasise the cognitive component. For example, in an early paper, Wine (1971) proposed a cognitive-attentional model of anxiety, arguing that test-anxious...