Some effects of test anxiety and presence or absence of other persons on boys' performance on a repetitive motor task

Test anxiety and direction of attention.

“…Sarason & Palola, 1960). Most of these studies have investigated the effects of feedback or instructional manipulations, though three were concerned with the effects of audience presence on task performance (Cox, 1966(Cox, , 1968Ganzer, 1968). Considering audience presence as a source of threatening evaluation, the results of both studies support the predictions of test anxiety theory.…”

Test Anxiety: A Major Educational Problem and What Can Be Done about It

“…Anxious children also do poorly compared with low-anxious children when they are asked to perform quickly (S. Sarason et al 1960) or when the task is introduced as a test of ability (Barnard, Zimbardo, & Sarason 196 1;Lekarczyk & Hill 1969;McCoy 1965). Other work shows that anxious children tend to work very cautiously in many evaluative situations (Ruebush 1963) and perform less well when an adult observer is present (Cox 1966(Cox , 1968. Low-anxious children are less affected by these manipulations; if anything, they perform better with some evaluative pressure.…”

The combined effect of audience and anxiety on paired-associates learning

“…However, the present research is concerned with wh at might be considered two different sources of irrelevant drive-audience and anxiety. Cox (1966Cox ( , 1968 has shown that the presence of an audience facilitates the performance of low-anxious children and interferes with the performance of high-anxious children on a marble-dropping task. Assuming that Zajonc is correct, it appears that these results are inconsistent with a summation hypothesis unless we assurne that the task elicited dominant responses in the low-anxious children and nondominant responses in the high-anxious children, wh ich seems unlikely.…”