Cognitive Test Anxiety and Academic Performance of Undergraduate Students in Istanbul

Abstract

Test anxiety has become a grueling burden, especially for students in the competitive world. As a result, contextualization of anxiety in education has been retaining the attention and demands of educators and psychologists so far. A student’s GPA in academic life is one of the crucial and numerical indicators of academic achievement. This present study endeavors to investigate the potential distinctions between the level of cognitive test anxiety of students in English Language Teaching (ELT) and English Language Literature (ELL) departments and their cumulative GPA (out of 4,00). Also, the second goal of this investigation is to delve into the possible significant differences marked between gender and students’ cognitive test anxiety levels. This investigation presents some sources to explicate test anxiety and students’ GPAs before presenting the main data results from a variety of studies. Finally, the Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale was employed by the researchers, so 60 English Language Teaching students and 46 English Language and Literature students showed their participation (N= 106) on Cognitive Test Anxiety Scale items. Following this part, this research is finalized with the conclusion, which includes an analysis of data results and an examination of relevant research findings. In the conclusion part, it can be seen that Cognitive Test Anxiety scores and students’ departments showed salient differences; however, Cognitive Test Anxiety and participants’ genders have similar points to each other. Moreover, there was no correlation detected between their GPAs and their levels of Cognitive Test Anxiety. However, both students’ GPAs scores and their departments and their GPAs’ and genders show some differences.