Test anxiety and off-task behavior in evaluative situations.

The relationship between performance and off-task behavior was examined as a function of childrens anxiety level in a clearly evaluative situation. 48 fourth-and fifth-grade boys and girls (assigned to low, middle, and high anxiety groups by their scores on the Test Anxiety Scale for Children) performed anagram tasks in the presence of an experimenter also working on anagrams. Frequency and direction of off-task glancing were used as measures of off-task behavior. As expected, both performance and off-task glancing were related to anxiety: high-anxious children hag than low- and middle-anxious children. It was proposed that anxious children's history of failure makes them more sensitive to and highly reliant on external feedback and evaluation and less likely to solve problems on their own. It was suggested that the performance of these children, who typically have greater ability than they show in evaluative situations, may be improved by increasing their on-task orientation through task-inherent and task-related feedback.