An Intervention Study On Test Anxiety Of Grade Nine Student

Test anxiety is being paid attention by more and more researchers. Research shows that test anxiety not only have a negative effect on students’ academic performance, but will harm individual’s physical and mental health. Although researchers have done a lot of work in this area, there still has some problem in existing researches. Such as using single intervention, using similar methods of intervention, neglecting study skills training, etc. This study was designed to compare different kind of interventions effect for test anxiety on 9th grade students, exploring effective factors of test anxiety intervention, providing new test anxiety intervention method for 9th grade students.In this study, we used Sarason Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) to select subjects who has high level of test anxiety, finally 36 middle school students were determined, and to investigate the degree of their test anxiety, before intervention the Surveying the Test Anxiety Influencing Factors Questionnaire (IFTAS) was implied. Screened 36 subjects were randomly divided into 4 experimental groups. Group 1 received the Test Anxiety Group Counseling intervention; Group 2 received Learning Skills Course intervention; Group 3 received Test Anxiety Counseling and Learning Skills Course intervention at the same time, while the control group accepted none of intervention. Group 1,2 accepted intervention only once a week, for 8 weeks; Group 3 took one kinds of intervention each week, a total of 16 times. The feedback of 4 experimental groups was collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and other means of intervention quantitative and qualitative analysis.The quantitative results are as follows:(1) TAS analysis shows that test anxiety score of group 1 has decreased not significantly after intervention, group 2 has increased not significantly after intervention, group 3 has declined significantly after intervention; (2) IFTAS analysis shows that subjects from group 1 test anxiety score has declined significantly, low self-esteem dimension and concern about the consequences dimension has also reduced significantly after intervention; Subjects from group 2 concern about the poor academic performance dimension has declined significantly; Subjects from group 3 test anxiety score has declined significantly, low self-esteem dimension, concern about the consequences dimension and poor academic performance dimension has also reduced significantly after intervention; Subjects from control group interference of incidents dimension has increased significantly during the experiment; (3) Academic achievement analysis shows that group 1 has not changed significantly on academic achievement total score; Subjects from group 2 has increased their English and chemistry score after intervention; Subjects from group 3 has increased their chemistry score after intervention; Control group shows no significant change on academic achievement total score during the experiment.The qualitative results are as follows:(1) The crew of test anxiety counseling group think the activity can make them feel happy and relaxed, promote their group cohesion, learn practical ways to relax, deepen understanding of the self and others, etc; The help from the group activities can be summarized as follows:having a better understanding for test anxiety, experiencing the feeling of relaxation and master relaxation techniques; The crew of test anxiety counseling group suggested extend the warm-up activities, to extend the time of group counseling. (2) The crew of Learning Skills Course satisfied with the content settings of study skills course overall, each theme of the course content is evaluated; The help from the courese can be summarized as follows:learning new ways of learning, getting some test-taking skills and having more reflection on their learning process; Suggestions from the crew of course includes: refinement of content of course, add more practice part, etc.By this research we can draw the following conclusions:1. Test Anxiety Group Counseling intervention is effective in reducing 9th grade students’ test anxiety level, but improving academic performance is not obvious.2. Learning Skills Course intervention is invalid in reducing 9th grade students’ test anxiety, but is effective in improving academic performance.3. Test Anxiety Group Counseling combine Learning Skills Course intervention is effective both in reducing 9th grade students’ test anxiety level, and improving academic performance.