Within the transactional process model of test anxiety, students who perceive their summative evaluation as threatening will experience a rise in emotional anxieties that activate worry cognitions characterized by self-critical thoughts, which in turn, diverts the student’s attention away from task-relevant thoughts. We attempted to reduce the anxieties localized around testing events in a large general chemistry course at the University of Washington by instituting a group-testing protocol. In this talk, we will compare the impact of a group-testing protocol on both cognitive and affective variables across treatment and the control (i.e. individual testing) groups. Self-report test anxiety data, as measured by the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale Reduced (CTAR), was gathered at both the beginning and end of the Autumn 2016 and 2017 quarters. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the CTAR was conducted to gather evidence in support of the known single-factor structure for our target population. We also conducted multi-group CFA to establish measurement invariance of the CTAR across comparison groups, including: women and men, represented and underrepresented minorities, socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged students, and first-generation and continuing-generation students. Multivariate linear regression (MLR) was conducted to model the relationships between test anxiety, test performance, and other variables. Finally, we modeled the differential effects of the group-testing protocol on test performance across the groups-of-interest. Implications for summative assessment practices will be synthesized in the context of supporting student persistence in STEM, especially for underrepresented and disenfranchised student groups.

The impact of a group-testing protocol on student test anxiety and test performance in a general chemistry course at the University of Washington

255th National Meeting (2018)

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