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The Interaction between Anxiety and Perceived Difficulty of Task in Assessment Situations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2015

R.N. Paddle
R.N. Paddle*
Affiliation:
Institute of Catholic Education, Oakleigh, Australia
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Extract

The study of interactions between anxiety and other performance related variables was first carefully documented with the Manifest Anxiety Scale (Taylor, 1951) used in paired associate learning tasks. Reviews of this literature have shown that high anxious subjects usually perform significantly better on easy tasks, and worse on difficult tasks, than low anxious subjects (Taylor, 1958).

Later research workers concerned with anxiety in education broadly adopted interactionist approaches when confronted by consistently low negative relationships between anxiety and attainment (Cronbach & Snow, 1977; Gaudry, 1977).

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Educational and Developmental Psychologist , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , May 1986, pp. 12 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Australian Psychological Society 1986

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