A Study On The Differences Of High School Students With Different Anxiety Levels In Judging The Difficulty Of Mathematics Test Questions

Moderate test anxiety puts the brain and organism in a proper state of arousal or excitement and promotes candidates' pre-test review and performance,but excessive test anxiety can hinder students' performance in the test and even adversely affect candidates' physical and mental health.Nelson's study found that in addition to the difficulty of the questions themselves,the order of difficulty of the questions in a set of papers can also cause differences in test takers' performance.This study takes this as a starting point to investigate the effects of different difficulty distributions of test papers on candidates with different levels of test anxiety and different learning levels with the help of students' difficulty judgments of test questions in the process of doing the questions.This study used the test anxiety scale and three sets of self-administered test papers with different difficulty distributions to administer the test to senior high school students(1084 students)in a key high school in Shanxi Province,combined with interviews to analyze in depth the effects of test papers with different difficulty distributions on students' problem solving and difficulty judgments and their causes.As for the problem solving situation:(1)subjects with high anxiety scored significantly lower in difficulty than in ease;(2)subjects with low anxiety scored significantly higher in ease than in difficulty;(3)there was an interaction between anxiety,usual performance and difficulty distribution but it was not significant.Difficulty judgments:(1)There were differences in the difficulty judgments of the whole set of papers among subjects with different anxiety.High-anxious subjects were more sensitive to difficult-medium papers,low-anxious subjects were more sensitive to easy-medium papers,and high-anxious subjects thought the whole set of papers was more difficult for the same paper type;(2)different anxious subjects differed in their judgment of the difficulty of difficult papers.The subjects with different anxieties all thought that the difficult questions in the difficult-medium paper were easier,while the subjects with high anxiety thought that the difficult questions in the difficult-medium and easy-medium papers were more difficult;(3)when the subjects judged the difficulty of the questions,they were also influenced by subjective factors such as familiarity,thinking,knowledge and method mastery,and psychology.By compiling the reasons for the subjects' judgments and conducting in-depth interviews with the subjects,the key point of the difficulty distribution of the test questions was the position of the difficult questions,which the subjects subconsciously believed that the test paper was from easy to difficult.When the difficult questions were placed at the beginning,the high-anxiety subjects were under more pressure and still had no idea on the "easy" questions,which made them more nervous and affected their analysis later.Low-anxiety subjects are slow to adjust their mindset when they are faced with easy-to-difficult papers that go directly to difficult questions,which can lead to psychological discomfort and affect the performance of the test.