The Effect Of State Test Anxiety On The Ability Of Working Memory Update And Removal Of Junior High School Students

In recent years,test anxiety has become more and more common,which has become one of the common psychological problems of primary and secondary school students.Test anxiety will not only have a negative impact on students' academic performance,but also seriously affect students' mental health.Junior high school students had a high level of test anxiety,and junior high school is an important turning stage in the whole academic stage,so we should pay more attention to the test anxiety of junior high school students.Working memory update is the behavior of replacing the old information in working memory with new information.It is one of the important functions of central executive system and plays an important role on cognitive activities.Test anxiety is generally divided into trait test anxiety and state test anxiety.Previous studies have mainly investigated the impact of trait test anxiety on the ability of working memory update,which lacked the impact of state test anxiety on the ability of working memory update.The aim of the Experiment 1 was to explore the effect of test anxiety on junior high school students' working memory update.Removal is the core process of working memory update,which can speed up the updating of working memory.The purpose of the Experiment 2 had two aims.The first aim was to explore the effect of test anxiety on junior high school students' removal ability,and the second aim was to explore whether removal could speed up the working memory update of high test anxiety junior high school students.This article mainly examined the effect of state test anxiety on the ability of working memory update and removal of junior high school students.100 participants in Dalian century middle school were selected by the test anxiety scale TAI(High test anxiety group: fifty;Low test anxiety group: fifty).A test pressure situation was created to induce test anxiety.The Experiment 1 used the 2–back task to measure the ability of working memory update of junior high school students.The 2–back task presented a series of stimuli to the participants,and the task of the participants was to judge whether the new emerging stimulus were consistent with the penultimate stimulus.In the 2–back task,the judgment of consistent or inconsistent reaction time and accuracy rate were indicators of working memory update ability.The Experiment 2 used the working memory update task to measure the ability of workingmemory update and removal.This task presented 3 letters to the participants and asked them to remember,then the participants were asked to remove and update a certain letter through the removal cue.According to the length of the removal prompt time Cue Target Interval(CTI),the long CTI was 1500ms(the participant had enough time to remove the old information)and the short CTI was 200ms(the participant did not have enough time to start the removal).In the working memory update task,the update reaction time and update accuracy rate were the indexes of working memory update ability,and the removal rection time and removal speed were the indexes of removal ability.The article found:(1)In the 2–back tasks,the reaction time of test–related threat pictures of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly longer than that of low test anxiety junior high school students,and the accuracy rate of test–related threat pictures of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly lower than that of low test anxiety junior high school students.In the working memory update task,the update reaction time of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly longer than that of low test anxiety junior high school students,and the update accuracy rate of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly lower than that of low test anxiety junior high school students.These results indicated that state test anxiety impaired the ability of working memory update of junior high school students.(2)In the working memory update task,the removal reaction time of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly longer than that of low test anxiety junior high school students,and the removal speed of high test anxiety junior high school students were significantly slower than that of low test anxiety junior high school students.The results showed that state test anxiety impaired the ability of removal of junior high school students.(3)The reaction time of removal for high test anxiety group under the long CTI condition was significantly shorter than that under the short CTI condition.The result showed that in test stress situations,the removal function was still effective for the high test anxiety group,that is,the removal function could accelerate the working memory update rate of the high test anxiety group.Combining the results of the article,the following conclusions were drawn: state test anxiety impaired the ability of working memory update and removal of junior high school students.