Statistics Test Anxiety and Female Students

Abstract

Research suggests that high-anxious female students underperform in time-limited examinations compared to their low-anxious counterparts. Consequently, the purpose of this investigation was to determine whether differential performance on time-limited and time-unlimited statistics examinations, would be associated with test anxiety. Twenty-one female graduate students, enrolled in a statistics course, were assigned randomly to either a time-unlimited or time-limited examination condition. An interaction was found between test anxiety and examination condition, with high anxiety tending to be associated more strongly with underachievement in the time-limited than the time-unlimited condition. Implications for increasing the statistics performance of female students are discussed.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Benson

(1989). Structural components of statistical test anxiety in adults: An exploratory model. Journal of Experimental Education, 57, 247–261.

Cruise

R. J.

Cash

R. W.

Bolton

D. L.

(1985). Development and validation of an instrument to measure statistical anxiety. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Statistical Education Statistical Section, Proceedings of the American Statistical Association.

Cruise

R. J.

Wilkins

E. M.

(1980). STARS: Statistical Anxiety Rating Scale. Unpublished manuscript, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI.

Demaria-Mitton

P. A.

(1987). Locus-of-control, gender and type of major as correlates to statistics anxiety in college students. Dissertation Abstracts International, 48, 1397A.

Hill

K. T.

(1984). Debilitating motivation and testing: A major educational program, possible solutions, and policy applications. In Ames

R. E.

Ames

(Eds.), Research on Motivation in Education (Vol. 1, pp. 245–274). New York: Academic Press.

Hill

K. T.

Wigfield

Plass

J. A.

(1980, April). Effects of different kinds of optimizing instructions on seventh- and eighth-grade children's achievement test performance. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, MA.

Onwuegbuzie

A. J.

Da Ros

D. A.

Ryan

J. M.

(1994). The components of statistics anxiety: A phenomological study. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Plass

J. A.

Hill

K. T.

(1979, March). Optimizing children's achievement test performance: The role of time pressure, evaluation anxiety and sex. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society Research in Child Development, San Francisco, CA.

Zeidner

(1991). Statistics and mathematics anxiety in social science students—Some interesting parallels. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 61, 319–328.