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Test Anxiety Scale: reliability among Ethiopian students.

P Mohan Raju¹, Misganaw Mesfin, Esa Alia

¹Department of Psychology, Addis Ababa University. rajupm30@gmail.com

Psychological Reports

|February 18, 2011

Summary

The Amharik version of Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale shows good reliability for Ethiopian students. While internal consistency is high, factor analysis results varied across grade levels, with younger students reporting higher test anxiety.

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Area of Science:

Psychological Assessment
Educational Psychology
Cross-cultural Psychology

Background:

Test anxiety is a significant factor affecting academic performance.
Validated assessment tools are crucial for understanding student well-being in diverse educational contexts.
The Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale is a widely used measure, but its adaptation for Ethiopian students requires psychometric evaluation.

Purpose of the Study:

To translate and validate Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale for use with Ethiopian students.
To assess the internal consistency and factor structure of the Amharik version of the scale.
To examine differences in test anxiety levels between younger (Grade 8) and older (Grades 11-12) students.

Main Methods:

The Amharik version of Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale was administered to 391 Grade 8 students and 422 preparatory school students (Grades 11-12).
Internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach's alpha and item-remainder correlations.
Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess the scale's factor structure.

Main Results:

The Amharik Test Anxiety Scale demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = .84) in both samples.
Item-remainder correlations met acceptable criteria for 32 items in Grade 8 and 19 items in preparatory school.
Confirmatory factor analyses did not fully support the established factor loadings from previous literature.
Grade 8 students reported significantly higher mean test anxiety scores compared to students in Grades 11 and 12.

Conclusions:

The Amharik version of Sarason's Test Anxiety Scale is a reliable and potentially useful tool for assessing test anxiety in Ethiopian students.
While psychometric properties are generally sound, further refinement may be needed for specific items, particularly in older student samples.
The findings highlight that test anxiety levels may decrease with age and academic progression in this population.