The Impact of Cognitive Test Anxiety on Text Comprehension and Recall in the Absence of External Evaluative Pressure

SUMMARY Two studies examined the effects of cognitive test anxiety on students’ memory, comprehension, and understanding of expository text passages in situations without externally-imposed evaluative pressure. The results gathered through structural equations modelling demonstrated a significant impact of cognitive test anxiety on performance in conditions with and without external evaluative pressure. The impact of cognitive test anxiety was stronger in those conditions with external evaluative pressure. The results are interpreted to support processing models of test anxiety that propose test anxiety interferes with learning through deficiencies in encoding, organization, and storage in addition to the classic interpretation of retrieval failures. In addition, the data provide support for additive models of test anxiety that address both stable and situational factors in the overall impact of cognitive test anxiety on performance. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Research on the role of test anxiety on performance has repeatedly demonstrated that high levels of cognitive test anxiety promote the probability of notable declines in exam performance. The classic interpretation of this relationship was that irrelevant thinking and heightened worry intrude upon conscious thought during the test session itself, inhibiting performance through a retrieval-blocking process (Morris, Davis, & Hutchings, 1981; Sarason, 1986; Sarason, Pierce, & Sarason, 1996; Zohar, 1998). However, this view of test anxiety has been demonstrated to be overly limited in scope, and contemporary conceptualizations of cognitive test anxiety have focused on processing deficiencies that appear to accompany anxiousness over tests at various phases in the learning-testing cycle (Cassady, in press; Cassady & Johnson, 2002; Covington, 1985; Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1992). Models of test anxiety that focus on deficits in basic information processing have been supported by data demonstrating that test anxious students have difficulty with cognitive processes beyond the classic view of retrieval failure. That is, students with high levels of test anxiety experience problems with encoding and storage processes as well, commonly leading to inadequate conceptual representations of the content (Benjamin, McKeachie, Lin, & Holinger, 1981; McKeachie, 1984; Mueller, 1980; Naveh-Benjamin, 1991).