Basic School Education: The Positive Effects Of Test Anxiety

Fortunately, basic school education is made available for everyone in the Western world. In some countries around Europe, education even became compulsory decades ago. Therefore, it is inevitable to be confronted with school on a daily basis for most of children and adolescents. Despite experiencing the positive effects of learning and collecting experiences, one has to deal with the evaluation and testing of this attained knowledge. Some students are afraid of the evaluation or the demands that come along with test situations. Test anxiety, also known as exam anxiety is defined as the individual experience of anxious feelings related to test situations (Sawka-Miller, 2011). It is considered to be a subcategory of performance anxiety, but it
The extent to which someone has bodily symptoms differ. These symptoms range from shaky hands to becoming physically ill depending on the severity of test anxiety (Vassend, 1988). Generally, symptoms of headache, nausea, diarrhea, excessive sweating, shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat, and sleep apnea can all occur (Reference). Implausible bodily symptoms are often generated by psychopathology. In psychology, there is a special term for physical symptoms that appear without any plausible biological basis called psychosomatic or somatoform symptoms (Angenendt & Härter, 2001). One study suggests that 20% of the patients who show off to primary care doctors are experiencing physical symptoms which have a purely psychological cause (Kallivayalil & Punnoose, 2010). The researchers Hiller, Rief, and Brähler (2006) investigated the occurrence of somatization in the German population. They found that 81,6% of their sample reported at least one mild symptom, while 22,1% reported at least one symptoms with an acute severity. Generally, their results showed that somatization is rather displayed in multiple ways than on one single symptom. In short, psychosomatic symptoms are physical reactions towards mental distortions which cannot be traced back to organic biologic
The intensity of subjective perception of stressors and the attitude towards it can affect the way a student handles testing situations (Murberg & Bru, 2007). Characteristics such as neuroticism make one prone towards the effects of test anxiety (Murberg & Bru, 2007). A study by Stoeber, Feast, and Hayward (2009) investigated whether perfectionism can be linked to test anxiety. The researchers differentiated between self-oriented perfectionism linked to intrinsic learning motivation and socially-prescribed perfectionism which is related to extrinsic motivation. Furthermore, they deviated test anxiety into four categories: worry, emotionality, interference, lack of confidence, and total anxiety. It was found that socially-prescribed perfectionism correlates with all categories of test anxiety except of worrying. On the one hand, socially-prescribed perfectionists are rather disturbed by the consequences arising due the violation of social expectations in case of failure. On the other hand, self-oriented perfectionists worry more about their skills. Finally, the findings show that the fear of social failure (socially- prescribed perfectionism) and extrinsic learning motivation and might be responsible for higher scores in test anxiety. In conclusion, the way of coping with school-related stress as well as the somatisation of stress in general differs among individuals.