A Research On The Determinants Of Test Anxiety Of Students In Senior Grade 3 And The Study Of Its Intervention

Test anxiety is a kind of highly anxious negative emotion of individual facing exam, who worry about hurting the self-esteem owing to their failure in exam. It is one of the serious psychological problems brought by test. It not only does harm to one's cognition, emotion, mental state and personality, but also does harm to students' body and mind health. Students in Senior Grade 3 are faced with the most important examination in their life named College entrance examination, so their test anxiety is heavily. Taking the students in Senior Grade 3 as subjects, this study find out the factors of test anxiety of students in Senior Grade 3, and make intervention to these testanxiety determinants to reduce students' test anxiety level.Firstly, this study gives a general introduction to the definition, formingprocess, determinants, effects on students and counseling strategies of test anxiety. Then, based on various relative domestic and foreign resources and on a general survey on teacher and students, the Influencing Factor Inventoryon test anxiety of students in Senior Grade 3 was developed by means of open-ended questionnaire and factor analysis. It is proved that the reliability and validity of the questionnaire is satisfying by test. A sample of 375 students in Senior Grade 3 of two high schools in Taiyuan was administrated with this questionaire, the result shows that there are 5 factors influence the test anxiety of students in Senior Grade 3. They are the worry about others' evaluation, inferiority, deficiency of learning strategies, the worry about future, and the test situations in turn.Secondly, on the base of analysis of the factors of test anxiety of students in Senior Grade 3, and with the reference of domestic and abroad literatures and expertise, the study designed an intervention program to reduce test anxiety. The program includes applying intervention of using Rational-Emotive Therapy to the factor of worry about others' evaluation and factor of inferiority;applying intervention of using learning strategies counseling to the factor of deficiency of learning strategies;applying intervention of Career Planning counseling to factor of the worry about future, applying intervention of Relaxation therapy and Systematic Desensitization to the factor of test situations, and holding a meeting of students' parents to control outside factors of test anxiety. Based on the program, 107 students of Senior Grade 3 of Taiyuan Jiancaoping No. 1 Middle School were chosen to be experimental objects, and they were divided into two groups, that one is experimental group, and the other is control group. Then, the study appliedpretest-posttest equivalent-group experimental design to examine the differences between the two groups. The result shows that, after the experiment, the decreasing extent of test anxiety scores of the experimental group is more than control group. It means that the intervention can decrease the test anxiety level of experimental group significantly, and it suggests that the intervention is effective on decrease of test anxiety and it can decrease the test anxiety of students in Senior Grade 3 to a certain extent.