A Study On The Test Anxiety Of Primary School Children And Its Relationship With Social Preference

Test anxiety is one of the serious psychological problems inspired by the exam situation, which harms to students’ physical and mental development. Pupils are the future and hope of our motherland, whose healthy development is related to the destiny of our country. However, previous test anxiety researches pay much less attention to them. Therefore, it is of great significance to focus on pupils’ test anxiety.Based on the review of test anxiety theories and previous empirical research conclusions, this study carried out the following three sub-studies:Study 1 revised Children’s Test Anxiety Scale(CTAS) developed by Wren and Benson in 2004, combing with the actual situation of domestic pupils and the references to relevant professional scales.Study 2 used the revised CTAS to describe the state of domestic pupils’ test anxiety and to analyze the differences of their test anxiety scores in gender, grade, source of students and other demographic variables.Study 3 analyzed the relationship between social comparison orientation and test anxiety and their correlation with academic self-efficacy and self-esteem, and also explored the mediating effects of academic self-efficacy and self-esteem between social comparison orientation and test anxiety, which provided empirical evidence to ease and intervene pupil’ test anxiety from the perspective of enhancing their academic self-efficacy and self-esteem.The main conclusions are as follows:First, the revised CTAS is a 29-item inventory with good reliability and validity, which is comprised of three dimensions: thoughts, physical reactions and off-task behaviors.Second, pupils with high test anxiety scores accounts for about 16.3%, which shows that the state of pupils’ test anxiety is not as optimistic as imagined. In addition, pupils’ test anxiety has significant differences in gender, grade, source of students and other demographic variables.Third, pupils’ social comparison orientation is significantly negatively correlated with academic self-efficacy and self-esteem, and the former can negatively predict the latter two;pupils’ academic self-efficacy and self-esteem are significantly negatively correlated with test anxiety, and the first two can negatively predict the latter; pupils’ social comparison orientation is significantly positively correlated with test anxiety, and the former can positively predict the latter.Fourth, academic self-efficacy and self-esteem are the mediator variables between social comparison orientation and test anxiety. The mediating analyses show that study behavioral self-efficacy and self-esteem partially mediate the relationship among comparison on abilities and the three components of test anxiety(thoughts, physical reactions and off-task behaviors), and also partially mediate the relationship between comparison on opinions and thoughts. Meanwhile, study ability self-efficacy partially mediates the relationship between comparison on abilities and off-task behaviors.