Test Anxiety, Wellbeing, Generalised Anxiety, Panic

Data were collected from 918 participants aged 13-19 years from 8 secondary schools/ sixth form colleges (academic track upper secondary education), located in England and Wales, in a cross-sectional design. Data were collected electronically and participants were prompted if they had missed a question hence there were no missing data. Test anxiety was measured using the 16-item Multidimensional Test Anxiety Scale (Putwain et al., 2020). School-Related Wellbeing measured using the six-item School-Related Wellbeing Scale (Loderer et al., 2016). Generalized Anxiety and Panic were measured using the sub-scales from the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (Chorpita et al., 2005). In addition socio-demographic data was collected for gender (male, female, or prefer not to say), age, year group (The English/ Welsh equivalent of Grade), ethnic heritage (Asian, Black, White, Other, or mixed heritage - any combination of the other categories) and eligibility for free school meals (a proxy for low income; yes or no). Data were saved as an SPSS .sav file (that includes all items for the above scales, response ranges and anchors, and the categorical coding for the aforementioned socio-demographic data. Research questions were as follows: 1. Does the MTAS demonstrate measurement invariance for gender, age and free school meals? 2. How does the test anxiety relate to school-related wellbeing, and symptoms of generalized anxiety and panic? We hypothesised that text anxiety would be negatively related to school-related wellbeing and positively related to generalized anxiety and panic. 3. Can a cut score for the MTAS be reliably established to predict clinical significance for generalized anxiety and panic? 4. How closely are the items for text anxiety, school-related wellbeing, generalized anxiety, and panic related? References Chorpita, B. F., Moffitt, C., & Gray, J. (2005). Psychometric properties of the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale in a clinical sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 309-322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2004.02.004 Loderer, K., Vogl, E., & Pekrun, R. (2016, August 24-27). Students’ well-being at school revisited: Development and initial validation of a unidimensional self-report scale [Conference session]. International Conference on Motivation (ICM), Thessaloniki, Greece. http://www.psy.auth.gr/el/conference/programme. Putwain, D.W., von der Embse, N.P., Rainbird, E.C., & West, G. (20209). The development and validation of a new Multidimensional Test Anxiety Scale (MTAS). European Journal of Psychological Assessment. Advance online pulication, https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000604