Statistics test anxiety and female students

Research suggests that high-anxious female students underperform in time-limited examinations compared to their low-anxious counterparts. Consequently, the purpose of this investigation was to determine whether differential performance on time-limited and time-unlimited sta-tistics examinations, would be associated with test anxiety. Twenty-one female graduate students, enrolled in a statistics course, were assigned randomly to either a time-unlimited or time-limited examination condi-tion. An interaction was found between test anxiety and examination condition, with high anxiety tending to be associated more strongly with underachievement in the time-limited than the time-unlimited condi-tion. Implications for increasing the statistics performance of female students are discussed. Statistics test anxiety has been found to be experienced by many college students (Onwuegbuzie, Da Ros, & Ryan, 1994; Zeidner, 1991). In par-ticular, women tend to report higher levels of anxiety in statistics courses than do men (Benson, 1989; Demaria-Mitton, 1987). Although research has demonstrated that children with high levels of test anxiety do not perform as well in time-limited examinations as they do when time con-straints are removed (Hill, 1984; Hill, Wigfield, & Plass, 1980; Plass & Hill, 1979), effects of time limits and anxiety on statistics performance for female students are unknown. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to assess the relationship between statistics test anxiety and performance of female students examined under time-limited versus time-unlimited conditions. The following specific research questions were addressed: (a) To what extent does the level of statistics test anxiety interact with the length of time allocated to complete an examination in determining statis