Studying the relationship between anxiety and school achievement: evidence from PISA data

Abstract

Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 data for Italy, this paper offers a complete overview of the relationship between test anxiety and school performance by studying how anxiety affects the performance of students along the overall conditional distribution of mathematics, literature and science scores. We aim to indirectly measure whether higher goals increase test anxiety, starting from the hypothesis that high-skilled students generally set themselves high goals. We use an M-quantile regression approach that allows us to take into account the hierarchical structure and sampling weights of the PISA data. There is evidence of a negative and statistically significant relationship between test anxiety and school performance. The size of the estimated association is greater at the upper tail of the distribution of each score than at the lower tail. Therefore, our results suggest that high-performing students are more affected than low-performing students by emotional reactions to tests and school-work anxiety.

Relations Between Class Competition and Primary School Students’ Academic Achievement: Learning Anxiety and Learning Engagement as Mediators

“…These findings supported H2 and H3. Class competition negatively affected students’ academic achievement by increasing their learning anxiety, which was consistent with conclusions drawn by Sariem et al (2014) and D’Agostino et al (2021) . According to Lewin’s field theory ( Lewin, 1936 ), individuals’ mental activity and behaviors are closely related with the environment they live.…”

“…Previous studies confirmed that learning anxiety can lead to poor academic achievement among students (Sariem et al, 2014;Chang and Beilock, 2016;D'Agostino et al, 2021). Emotions have been found to affect a wide range of cognitive processes, including attention, memory storage and retrieval, social judgment, decision making and cognitive problem solving (Clore and Huntsinger, 2009).…”

Cognitive and Affective Factors in Relation to Learning

“…These findings supported H2 and H3. Class competition negatively affected students' academic achievement by increasing their learning anxiety, which was consistent with conclusions drawn by Sariem et al (2014) andD'Agostino et al (2021). According to Lewin's field theory (Lewin, 1936), individuals' mental activity and behaviors are closely related with the environment they live.…”

Anxiety, Low Self-Esteem and a Low Happiness Index Are Associated with Poor School Performance in Chilean Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

“…He demonstrated that children with lower academic self-concepts showed higher anxiety levels, with anxiety negatively predicting future achievements [ 26 ]. Likewise, other authors have also suggested the need to study the negative effects of anxiety on school performance [ 27 ] since students with higher anxiety levels are likely to learn less [ 28 ]. However, the association between happiness and academic performance is an emerging area of research, and, unfortunately, there is limited evidence on this relationship in children and adolescents [ 29 , 30 ].…”