Test Anxiety, Academic Achievement, and Self-Esteem among Arab Adolescents with and without Learning Disabilities

Abstract

The aim of the current study was twofold: (a) to explore differences in test anxiety and self-esteem between adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) and those without them; (b) and to study the relationship between test anxiety and academic achievement. This research is the first to consider these relationships among Christian Arab adolescents living in Israel as an Eastern collectivist minority. Before the final examination of the first semester of the school year, 102 Christian Arab students completed Friedman and Bendas-Jacob's Test Anxiety Questionnaire (1997) and Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Inventory (1965), and teachers reported their academic grades. A series of one-way analyses of variance were run to check for differences between the two groups. On the whole, students with LD reported higher levels of test anxiety and lower levels of self-esteem than their nondisabled peers. Their intense distress can be expected to impair their academic performance.

Attachment, self-esteem and test anxiety in adolescence and early adulthood

“…Nevertheless, we expect that age differences will vary in the sub-categories of test anxiety. We hypothesise that cognitive obstruction and tenseness will be higher among young adult college students than among adolescent high school students, following the trend that test anxiety increases with age revealed in previous studies (McDonald, 2001;Peleg, 2009). We suggest that social derogation may be higher among adolescents than among young adults.…”

“…Previous research 660 O. Dan et al has suggested that in general, college-aged young adults suffer from higher test anxiety compared with school-aged adolescent students (Peleg, 2009). Nevertheless, we expect that age differences will vary in the sub-categories of test anxiety.…”

Why not the best? Social anxiety symptoms and perfectionism among Israeli Jews and Arabs: a comparative Study

“…The self in this culture is part of the group rather than an independent entity; thus the success or failure of an individual becomes that of the family as a whole. As a result, IA students may feel shame, guilt, and fear that they might lose their parents' support, and this may trigger anxiety [39]. Our results may be seen in a similar perspective.…”

“…However, the groups had similar ATQ-N scores. We believe that the Eastern collectivistic features of the IA group [39] were overcame by anxiety-provoking tendencies of their being a minority, their difficulty to enter the Israeli life and Israeli colleges, and perhaps due to their pressure to achieve in a society that gives them too few chances due to their minority status [17][18][19][20]. Arab youngsters experience pressure from their parents on many life issues, and especially on personal choices as college studies.…”

“…In an adjacent topic, studies yielded higher levels of test anxiety [51,52] and trait anxiety [53] among IA adolescents than in their IJ counterparts. These findings have been explained by the fact that the Arabs in Israel are a relatively collectivisticcommunal, homogenous cultural group [39]. The Arab society is characterized by slower-paced societal change and is a non-assimilating minority, differing from the Jewish majority in language, religion and nationality [54].…”