ABSTRACT
The effects of anxiety on learning from instruction have been frequently demonstrated. Despite the robustness of this effect the number of studies of anxiety in the educational research and educational psychology literature in the United States has been relatively modest in the last two decades (Tobias, 1979). An analysis of the 1983 program of the American Educational Research Association, for example, reveals only a single session devoted to test anxiety, and none to the more general topic of anxiety. This deemphasis of anxiety research is probably attributable to the paradigm shift to a more cognitive psychology. Recent attempts to reinterpret the construct of test anxiety entirely in terms of deficits in cognitive acquisition skills, to be reviewed in detail below, are consistent with this zeitgeist.
