RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A BEHAVIORAL AND SEVERAL PSYCHOMETRIC MEASURES OF TEST ANXIETY

Summary.-Behavioral time-sampling was compared with various paperand-pencil, self-report measures of test anxiety in an examination of the utility of the behavioral measure as an in situo index of test anxiety. The behavioral measure was significantly and positively correlated 0.45 with a paper-and-pencil, self-report measure of "facilitative" cest anxiety bur not with measures of "debilitative" test anxiety (r = -0.15) or general anxiety (r = -0.33) for 12 male and 21 female undergraduates. Systematic desensirization has often been used to help students become less anxious in test-taking situations, the effectiveness of the treatment frequently being assessed by means of three kinds of criterion measures: paper-and-pencil, self-report anxiety scales, examination performance, and grade point average. Unfortunately, these methods of assessment are all indirect and inferential, i.e., they do not assess the level of anxiety while the individual is actually in a test-taking situation. It is as yet unclear what factors account for the relationship between the treatment procedures and the observed changes in these kinds of criterion measures. That is, paper-and-pencil, self-report measures are subject to various sorts of response bias, performance on examinations may be affected by many variables other than those attributable to a specific treatment, and grade point average seems to depend on many factors of which rest-taking is but one. Moreover, few investigators have examined the relationship between the various criterion measures and behavior in an acrual test-taking sirnation. Previous investigators (4, 6) have theorized that the highly test-anxious individual responds to the test-taking situation with behaviors that are inappropriate to and interfere with successful task completion. While some investigators (4) have conceptualized these inappropriate and irrelevant behaviors as being part of an internalized cognitive process, others (6) have conceptualized them in terms of more readily observable motoric responses, postulating that such emissions are associated with increased sympathetic arousal. Inherent in the larter conceptualization is the assumption that either the emission of or an increase in the frequency or intensity of such rnotoric responses is associated with a debilitating level of test anxiety. However, in no study has the frequency of such a behavioral response been related to any self-report measure of facilitating test anxiety. The present investigation examined the utility of the more observable, motoric responses to the test-taking situation, in the form of a behavioral time-sampling measure, and assessed the relationship between this index and several paper-and-pencil, self-report measures of facilitating test anxiety, debilitating cest anxiety, and general anxiety for 12 male and 21 female students enrolled in two psychology classes at San Jose State University. These subjects ranged in age from 18 to 42 yr., and in class standing from sophomores to graduate students. One week prior to final course examinations, the subjects were administered the Facilitating and Debilitating Anxiety Scales of the Achievement Anxiety Test (I), the Fear Survey Schedule I1 (3), and the Neuroticism Scale of the Maudsley Personality Inventory (2). During the final examination, subjects were observed by two independent raters who noted the occurrence of certain classes of motor behaviors, i.e.. head, trunk, and leg movements, at predetermined intervals. Behavioral scores were then computed for each individual subject and compared with their responses on the paper-and