Test Anxiety and Proficiency of Grade 11 STEM Students in Mathematics: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

In the Philippines, with the Senior High School curriculum that the students are still trying to adapt to, so many afflictions are getting involved most especially to some of the math related courses, Calculus, General Mathematics, and Statistics to name a few. Simply, test anxiety can be characterized as an unreasonable degree of fear, worry, and apprehension before, during, and/or after testing situations. The researchers would like to examine the combined effects of having test anxiety to the performance and behavior training of the students and to what extent does it could merely affect an individual in their academic performances.

METHODS

The researchers used a descriptive method with a quantitative approach. This study involves the development of the hypothesis regarding the collected information on how having test anxiety could affect academic performance among the selected respondents. Standardized and self-constructed questionnaires were used as the main data gathering instrument. The collected data was tallied and used Chi-Square to verify the validity of the data.

RESULTS

The data gathered from the survey questionnaires shows that most of the students were male with grades that are satisfactory (80-84) and very satisfactory (85-89) in Mathematics. Among the different manifestations of test anxiety, worrying about the result got the highest weighted mean, suggesting that it is the most experienced manifestation of test anxiety by the Grade 11 STEM students. The results also show that the students are most proficient in terms of understanding mathematical concepts, knowing how to expand the expression, determining the domain, range, and characteristics of the graph and determining what is asked. It can be gleaned from the results that test anxiety has a significant effect on the math proficiency of the students. This serves to be true as well between gender and test anxiety.

DISCUSSIONS

The results demonstrate that the presence of test anxiety on students greatly affects and influence their Math proficiency. With this, when an individual has experienced this anxiety or fear, it is more likely to have a great impact and influence on how they will perform in class. The students were advised to be mindful of their well-being at the same time know that they are not alone in dealing with test anxiety. Test anxiety on other subjects may also be considered by future researchers as test anxiety can not only be present in math related subjects.