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Selective influence of test anxiety on reading processes
1Department of Cognitive Psychology, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
British Journal of Psychology (London, England : 1953)
|August 1, 1993
Summary
Test anxiety does not hinder reading comprehension but increases reading time. Anxious readers require more cognitive resources for text processing, particularly for higher-level integration.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Educational Psychology
Background:
- Test anxiety is a common concern for students.
- Its impact on cognitive processes during reading is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if test anxiety affects reading comprehension.
- To determine if anxious individuals spend more time reading.
- To identify which cognitive processes are impacted by test anxiety.
Main Methods:
- High- and low-anxiety students participated.
- Texts were read word-by-word using the moving-window technique.
- Multiple regression analyses examined word-reading times and psycholinguistic variables.
Main Results:
- Test anxiety did not impair reading comprehension.
- Anxiety increased word-reading times.
- Anxiety interactively affected reading times with variables like clause endings and narrativity.
Conclusions:
- Anxious readers need more processing resources for equivalent comprehension.
- Anxiety selectively impairs text-level processing, like information integration across sentences.
- Low-level cognitive processes (encoding, lexical access) are unaffected by anxiety.