STATISTICS TEST ANXIETY AND FEMALE STUDENTS

Research suggests that high-anxious female students underperform in time-limited examinations compared to their low-anxious counterparts. Consequently, the purpose of this investigation was to determine whether differential performance on time-limited and time-unlimited statistics examinations, would be associated with test anxiety. Twenty-one female graduate students, enrolled in a statistics course, were assigned randomly to either a time-unlimited or time-limited examination condition. An interaction was found between test anxiety and examination condition, with high anxiety tending to be associated more strongly with underachievement in the time-limited than the time-unlimited condition. Implications for increasing the statistics performance of female students are discussed.