Language proficiency, test anxiety and their effect on working memory capacity

Abstract: English language proficiency and test anxiety among Spanish speakers might affect performance on working memory (WM) tasks, not taking this into consideration, could result in the unreliable measurement of true WM capacity and true ability on tasks that require WM involvement. WM was defined as a system with a limited storage and temporal capacity for information-processing, which also involves attentional control and manipulation of information (Baddeley, 2003). WM performance has been found to be positively affected by bilingualism on WM tasks requiring attentional control (Engle, 2002). Furthermore, the information processing aspect of WM has been found to be negatively affected by test anxiety (Lee, 1999). As such, the present study is aiming to investigate the effects of test anxiety on working memory performance among Spanish/English speakers. The study will use a t-test, analysis of variance, and multiple regression to explore results.Educational Psycholog