Gender Differences in Test Anxiety

Introduction Test anxiety is a multidimensional construct that has been defined as the set of phenomenological, physiological, and behavioral responses that accompany concern about possible negative consequences or failure on an exam or similar evaluation. The research study question is, “Do males and females significantly differ on their level of test anxiety?” The topic is a significant problem to students as well as counselors as they endeavor to alleviate the causes of anxiety attacks (gender has been identified as a cause of high test anxiety) during an evaluative situation whose effects are dire to the reduction of GPA on every level of education and academic achievement. According to Fiore (2003), students suffer lower academic achievements due to high test anxiety (worry and emotionality components are intense) bearing in mind that certain types of subjects or disciplines pose greater anxiety levels than others. The main goal for this study is to compare test anxiety responses between males and females among the 41 participants of CSUN. Age range for females is 21 to 50 and males have 22 to 27. It is clear that female students have a higher (SD= 6.9) than male students with (SD=1.5). The skewed age distribution seems to destabilize the results and serves as a valid explanation for either the lower or higher anxiety levels on sex differences.
Literature review On the basis of the empirical literature, it is clear that test anxiety is associated with reduced student grade point average (Farooqi, Ghani,& Spielberg, 2012), but there are few large scale studies reporting that there are significant gender differences in test anxiety. Although, studies have consistently found that females student have significantly higher test anxiety than male students, sex differences and a mix of other independent sample variables should be factored (age chronology, gender and disciplines for example mathematics and sciences verse verbal aptitude tests ) into future