Motivation, Evaluation, and Educational Testing Policy

Sociocultural and Educational Correlates of Success-Failure Attributions and Evaluation Anxiety in the School Setting for Black, Hispanic, and Anglo Children

“…Moreover, debilitating effects of a high level of test anxiety increase not only across the elementary school years (Hill & Sarason, 1966) but all the way through high school (Fyans,Note 2;Hill,Note 3;Maehr,Note 4). Recent experimental evidence indicates that anxiety is the main causal factor in the anxiety-performance relationship (see Hill, 1980). Highly anxious children can, in fact, achieve and perform well in school and on tests when in optimizing environments or when testing conditions are designed to eliminate negative motivational effects.…”

“…There has been concern with the disturbing fact that children outside the middle American mainstream often suffer from debilitating negative motivation that interferes with academic performance and school progress (Hill, 1977(Hill, , 1980Maehr, 1978;Zigler & Butterfield, 1968;Fyans, Note 2). These theoretical and practical concerns have spawned a host of studies endeavoring to uncover a link between sociocultural background and motivation as it relates to achievement.…”

“…Maehr and Nicholls have suggested that a fruitful way to study sociocultural origins of achievement-related motives is to set the research in the context of attribution theory. Hill (1976Hill ( , 1980 has suggested the value of studying social factors and achievement-related motives with an emphasis on test anxiety, which functions as a basic factor in many evaluative contexts. The present research emphasizes the value of studying attributions and evaluation anxiety simultaneously, especially in view of an extensive study by Fyans (Note 2) indicating that attributions and test anxiety are independent predictors of achievement.…”

Changes in Computer Anxiety in a Required Computer Course

“…High-anxiety children have a strong desire to avoid criticism and failure because they fear negative evaluation. In contrast, low-anxiety children are often more motivated to achieve success and obtain praise because they do not have a strong fear of failure (see Atkinson, 1964;Atkinson & Feather, 1966;Hill, 1972Hill, , 1980Hill & Wigfield, 1984;Sarason, Davidson, Lighthall, Waite, & Ruebush, 1960;Spielberger, 1972;Wine, 1980).…”

Examining the Relationship between Religiosity with Anxiety of Mothers and Number of Children

“…A certain level of anxiety is necessary not only to deal with the risk, planning, reading, an caution in driving, etc., but if fear and anxiety remain constrainedly can be very useful and even fun (Beiabangard, 1999). Since anxiety is an unpleasant quality, the suffered person resorts defensive instruments and reactions which have completely unconscious applications and the overuse of them is undesirable and leads to deeper mental-behavioral disorders (Hill & Sarason, 1990).…”