Application Of Imagery Dialogue In Senior Middle School Students' Test Anxiety

Test anxiety, a common negative emotion of Chinese students, especially for high school students under great academic pressure, has caused widespread public concern. Studies show that moderate test anxiety contributes to a better test performance, while over anxiety may affect students’physical and psychological health. Therefore, in-depth studies on test anxiety could help improving high school students’mental health as well as promoting the development of our education.In order to know the current overall situation of senior high students’ test anxiety, this study adopts Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) to survey 556 high school students from grade one and grade two of the East Campus of Yangzhou University Middle School. Besides, this study uses Imagery Communication Psychotherapy to release students’test anxiety and improve their mental health. We randomly select 30 subjects from 172 high school students with severe test anxiety to receive a group imagery communication and summarize the regular pattern of imaginary of those with severe test anxiety. Then, based on the imagery regular pattern, we design a specific intervention-randomly divide the 30 selected subjects into an intervention group and a control group, with 15 subjects in each group. The intervention group receives totally 10 interventions during five weeks (twice interventions a week), while the control group has no intervention. After all the interventions completed, measure and compare the test anxiety level of two groups to verify the effectiveness of group imagery communication psychotherapy.The results of the study are as follows:(1) The detectable rate of high school students’test anxiety is 65.5%, including 17.3% of those with mild test anxiety,31.8% of those with moderate test anxiety and 30.9% of those with sever anxiety.(2) High school students’ test anxiety level and state anxiety level influenced by factors like grade, gender, class type, family structure as well as major; senior high students’ trait anxiety level affected by gender and family structure.(3) Both state anxiety and trait anxiety relate to test anxiety and high school students’test anxiety tends to be state anxiety.(4) The imagery feature of students with severe anxiety is "untidy" (an untidy room and an unkempt character in the mirror), "bound" (a pit filled with sundries and subject himself trapped in a pit), and "depressive" (dim indoor light, feculent sundries in a pit, or pale eyes of a depressed character in a mirror).(5) Before the interventions, there is no significant difference between the intervention group and the control group on subjects’ test anxiety level and state-trait anxiety level. However, after the interventions, test anxiety level of all the subjects in the intervention group dropped dramatically and their state anxiety situation improved significantly. Besides, the changes between before and after intervention is quite remarkable, which means the group imagery communication psychotherapy has a positive effect on relieving high school students’ test anxiety and state anxiety. Nevertheless, there is little difference of students’ trait anxiety level of the intervention group between before and after intervention. Thus, the group imagery communication psychotherapy has no effect on trait anxiety.