, poor or sub-standard academic performance in high school in both Brazil and Egypt almost always ends an individualÆs academic career.
The literature generally indicates that higher levels of text anxiety are experienced by female high school students than by male high school students. Higher expectations of role conflict among female high school students frequently is offered as one explanation for this phenomenon.
Test Anxiety and Academic Performance
Pintrich and de Groot (1990) found that test anxiety was one of the best predictors of academic performance among students, with higher levels of test anxiety were associated with lower levels of academic performance. Smith, Michael, and Hocevar (1990) examined the effects of test anxiety on the academic performance of students in three performance contextsĂąverbal, figural, and mathematical. In this study, the subjects were divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was given test-taking instructions designed to induce higher levels of test anxiety, while the control group was provided with test-taking instructions designed to induce lower levels of test anxiety. The results of the experiment found that only mathematical performance was adversely affected within the experimental group in comparison with the performance of control group. Hagtvet (1991) also found that mathematical performance was affected by test anxiety to a greater extent than test anxiety affected performance in other academic areas. Based on these findings, it was concluded that personality characteristic most likely to hurt academic performance was a high fear of failure.
With respect to gender differences in mathematical performance, Felson and Trudeau (1991) concluded that lower academic performance by female students was more strongly associated with high-levels of test anxiety than with high-levels of fear of mathematics. This finding was important because of the...