Differential arousal of state anxiety and problem solving performance

Master of EducationIn Part A of an experiment, tertiary students were assigned at random to either failure or success experiences with three types of task materials. The effects of manipulations on reported state anxiety levels were examined using pro-treatment levels as the covariate. Data from ten replications indicated that, although adjusted means of failure groups were significantly higher than those of success groups, the magnitude of anxiety arousal depended upon the material used in the experimental treatment. Results indicated that exposure to anagram materials produced more marked variation in anxiety levels than either number or vocabulary materials. It was clear that students experiencing stronger failure showed higher adjusted state anxiety scores than did students experiencing milder failure or success. Greater lability of scores was found for female subjects and state anxiety arousal was found to be correlated significantly with proneness to test anxiety. In Part B, which was quasi-experimental, all subjects worked through a set of letter series problems. In post-hoc analyses, subjects within the failure or success treatments were classified by degree of proneness to test anxiety and level of orientation towards achievement. Levels of test anxiety and aroused state anxiety were associated with differences in both number of problems attempted and number of items abandoned. A significant triple interaction on the log time spent correctly solving problems, suggested that high state anxiety could either facilitate or debilitate performance depending on the strength of the trait differences. These results were consistent with the hypothesised operation of either impulsive or reflective strategies activated to cope with high anxiety arousal. It was found that reversed items of the State Anxiety Scale tended to reflect increases in situational stress to a greater extent than did directly stated items. The practice of reversing the scoring weights on reversed items to derive state anxiety scores does not appear to produce an exact alignment with the meaning of the directly stated anxiety items