The purpose of this study was to examine effects of test anxiety-coping training (TACT) program for the reduction of test anxiety. Twenty-four test anxious high school boys, who volunteered to participate in TACT program, were randomly assigned to eit...
The purpose of this study was to examine effects of test anxiety-coping training (TACT) program for the reduction of test anxiety. Twenty-four test anxious high school boys, who volunteered to participate in TACT program, were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group.
The subjects of the experimental group received seven 60-minute training sessons according to TACT program for four weeks. The subjects of the control group were told that their training would be delayed until the training of the experimental group was completed.
TACT program consisted of relaxation training, rational restructuring, test anxiety hierarchy, and coping with test anxiety through the imagination of test anxiety situations.
Effects of TACT program were assessed in terms of a Korean version of Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI). KTAI provides two subscale scores for measuring worry and emotionality which appear to be the major components of test anxiety. KTAI was administered to all subjects twice, before (pre-test) and after (post-test) the training sessons.
A 2 (experimental conditions) X (2) (pre-and post-test) ANOVA was applied for worry score, emotionality score, and total score respectively.
The major findings of the present study were as followed:
a) TACT program effectively reduces worry, emotionality and total scores of high school students' test anxiety.
b) Therefore, Cognitive behavior therapy containing systematic desensitization and cognitive restructuring procedures is effective for reducing both worry and emotionality in test situations.
c) To generalize the results of this study, future research is needed to investigate the improvement of academic performance through reducing test anxiety and the comparative effectiveness of systematic desensitization, cognitive restructuring and combined procedures in reducing test anxiety.