Keyword: anxiety

ABSTRACT: Tests or examinations are an essential part of education, creating test anxiety among students. Several studies identified a negative correlation between test anxiety and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students’ academic performance in higher education, and female students in STEM subjects showed more test anxiety before and during an examination. Studies also identified that STEM students could pay less attention to their examinations due to test anxiety. Such evidence in the context of Bangladeshi universities is yet to be understood. This study investigated the level of test anxiety among Bangladeshi university students of STEM subjects, including gender differences and the relationship between test anxiety and academic performance. We considered the quantitative research design to understand the status of test anxiety among undergraduate STEM students. A survey was conducted online from two STEM departments of a private university in Bangladesh using the shorter version of the CAEX test anxiety instrument, and a total of 246 undergraduate students participated. The findings show that Bangladeshi undergraduate STEM students generally felt slight anxiety during or before the examination. Female students were more anxious before or during a test than male students, and no significant relationship was found between test anxiety and academic achievement. The study reflects the need to conduct further research to understand the physiological, cognitive, and psychological factors leading to test anxiety among university students, as well as establishes a demand to identify the reasons behind having no relationship between test anxiety and students’ academic performance.

ABSTRACT: With the increasing inclusion of STEM activities across the K–12 curriculum, it is vital for educators to understand barriers and resistance to learning each of the elements of STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. Anxiety and self-efficacy for students and teachers have been identified as causes of STEM avoidance; however, this research is not distributed evenly across the elements. Therefore, this study documents potential causes for anxiety of each element, followed by a scoping review for each element of STEM-focused teacher anxiety, one of the major causes of STEM anxiety. The scoping review was guided by PRISMA standards and completed twice: once in Educational Resources Information Center and once in Scopus, with results demonstrating 94%–100% inter-rater reliability. It was found that causes of anxiety differ between the elements, and the scoping review revealed: (1) research on engineering anxiety and i-STEM or integrated STEM is lacking in comparison to the other elements, (2) the term “anxiety” is more established in reference to math than to the other elements, (3) technology appears in research as a tool more often than an area of research, and (4) the timeline of publication dates varies between the elements of STEM. These differences point to the need for more research in the underrepresented elements to develop intervention methods for teachers in order to reduce student attrition rates in STEM education.