Forty-eight fourth- and fifth-grade boys and girls designated as low-, middle-, or high-anxious performed anagram tasks in the presence of an experimenter also working on anagrams. Results showed that high-anxious children had the lowest performance scores and exhibited substantially more off-task glancing than low- and middle-anxious children.…

Effects of the motives to approach success and to avoid failure were studied in 60 fifth- and sixth-grade boys and girls of low, middle, and high levels of test anxiety. Findings indicated that anxious children perform poorly due to motivational difficulties rather than to learning deficiencies. (Author/JMB)

Examines the effect of metadiscourse characteristics (attitudinal, voice, and informational) and level of test anxiety on students' learning from social studies textbooks. Finds high anxious students perform best with first person voice and no attitudinal metadiscourse while low anxious students showed the opposite effect. (RS)

Examines how test anxiety affects children in certain evaluation situations and focuses on developing more valid and effective measurement procedures in school achievement testings. Third and fourth graders were divided into three anxiety groups and tested under time and no time pressures. Anxiety level, time pressure, and sex affected…

This program of research has three general thrusts. First, the relations between motivation and achievement performance were studied across children of various sociocultural backgrounds including lower- and middle- class white, black, and hispanic children. Motivational test bias was found to be strong for students of all sociocultural…

Discusses the problem of and solution to anxiety in school testing situations. Focuses on Hill and his colleagues' long term program of research. Describes school intervention studies where new evaluation procedures and teaching programs have been developed to help students perform better in evaluative situations. (CB)

Reviews a 20-year program of research on motivation and test performance, concluding that test anxiety and test-taking skill deficits are distorting factors in efforts to test student aptitude, achievement, and competency. (FL)

A study examined the role of metadiscourse characteristics and level of student anxiety as they affect learning from social studies textbooks. Metadiscourse is defined as an author's overt or non-overt presence in the discourse in order to direct rather than inform readers--the linguistic material given to readers so they will understand what is…

Educational solutions to the problem of test anxiety were explored. Test anxiety has a debilitating effect on performance which increases over the school years. The solution is, first, to measure test anxiety so that the extent of it, as well as the effectiveness of programs designed to alleviate it, can be measured. The seven-item Comfort Index,…