Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Test Anxiety among Students

ABSTRACT: Test anxiety can affect any student irrespective of gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, grade level or intellectual capacity. The study sought to develop and validate an instrument for measuring testvanxiety among students. A sample of 367 respondents (169 females and 198 males) were selected through multistage sampling procedures. An Exploratory Factor Analysis using Principal Component Analysis with Varimax (orthogonal) rotation and Eigen Values of 1 were used in the analysis. With this, two factors with the first factor accounting for 60.02% of the variability of the entire set of variables were retained. The KMO and Bartlett’s test of Sphericity were used to examine the relationship among the items. The KMO in assessing the sampling adequacy stood at 0.924 with the Bartlett’s test of sphericity (2 = 4267.666) being significant (p = 0.000). The inclusion criteria which served as the cut-off point was 0.40. After the analysis, 20 items loaded successfully on the main factor. After estimating the reliability coefficient (0.894) of the final 20 items, the study concludes that the items can be used by researchers, counsellors, teachers and other stakeholders to measure students’ test anxiety.
KEYWORDS: Test anxiety, Instrument development and validation, Reliability, Test