The Relationship between Test Anxiety and Silent Reading Gain

Failure to learn to read has continued to be a concern in education. Anxiety, as a personality variable, has been shown to be related to learn-ing. The present study investigated the relationship between test anxiety and silent reading gains as measured by standardized tests of vocabu-lary and comprehension skills. It was hypothesized that high test anx-iety: (a) has an inverse relationship to vocabulary gain and (b) has an inverse relationship to comprehension gain. Anxiety, in this study, is assumed to be an unpleasant emotional state with physiological concomitants which are consciously experienced by the child and to be related to test and test-like situations. Within this framework, anxiety becomes a hypothetical construct having predict-able consequences in terms of its effect on gain in silent reading as meas-ured by standardized tests. Other researchers, drawing from the work of Hull and Spence, have viewed anxiety as an operational measure of drive-level. Ruebush (1963, p. 474) feels that although these definitions