The Effect of Psychoeducation Programs on Test Anxiety of Secondary Education Students in the Distance Education Process

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate whether or not psychoeducation programs are effective on preventing and coping with possible negative situations, to be caused by anxiety status experienced by individuals in the test preparation process and developing life skills or not. In the study applying the experimental method, there were experimental and control groups with pretest-posttest data.The sample of the study comprised a total of 20 female secondary education students, (10 in the experimental group and 10 in the control group), who had a high level of test anxiety. The study was conducted on the distance education platform. The data collection tool of this study was the Test Anxiety Inventory which was developed by Spielberger, Gorsuch and Lushene (1980) and adapted into Turkish by Öner and Albayrak- Kaymak (1990). The Test Anxiety Inventory has two subscales as "Worry" and "Emotionality Anxiety". The Test Anxiety Inventory was applied to the individuals and the raw scores obtained as a result of the inventory were converted into standard total scores (Standard T-scores) according to the gender status in the "Test Anxiety Inventory". At the beginning of the application, the Test Anxiety Inventory was applied to both groups. Following this step, a psychoeducation program aimed at preventing test anxiety was applied to the experimental group for eight weeks. As a result of the program, the posttest was applied to the experimental and control groups. The pretest-posttest measurements were entered in the SPSS program (the Statistical Package for Social Sciences) and analyzed. Accordingly, it was concluded that psychoeducation programs were effective on preventing test anxiety in the distance education process.