The Effects of Coping Cat Program on Test Anxiety and Academic Performance in Sixth-Grade Elementary Students

Test anxiety is among the most common anxieties that children face during their education; it is also one of the main reasons for academic failure and inability to progress in elementary students. There is a treatment for test anxiety that can be used in various individual and group–based interventions. There exist several types of cognitive–behavioral programs for children, i.e., used in situations, like school. This is because this anxiety, as a deterrent to studentschr('39') academic achievement and performance, imposes significant costs on communities. Thus, the present study aimed to determine the effects of the Coping Cat Program (CCP) on test anxiety and academic performance in sixth–grade students.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest–follow–up and a control group design. The statistical population of the study included all sixth–grade female elementary students in Zanjan City, Iran, in the academic year of 2019–2020. Of whom, 40 qualified volunteers with the lowest average score (15.00) in the first semester 0 and highest scores (37.50) in the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI; Abolghasemi et al., 1996) were selected as the study samples. The study participants were randomly divided into the experimental and control groups. The inclusion criteria of the study included being sixth–grade female students, interested in cooperating with the present research, and having no biopsychological illnesses (based on the information in their academic records). Exclusion criteria also included the lack of interest in cooperating with the research and absence from >1 training sessions. The required data were collected in pretest, posttest, and follow–up phases by the TAI. Furthermore, to recognize the academic performance of the study subjects, the average scores obtained in the first semester of the academic year 2019–2020 were considered. Moreover, the experimental group received CCP (Kendall & Hedtke, 2006) in sixteen 60–minute sessions. In this period, the control group received no training. To evaluate the stability of the results, one month after the posttest, the experimental group was followed up. In this study, mean and standard deviation values were used to analyze descriptive statistics. Moreover, repeated–measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze the obtained data; Benfroni posthoc test was applied to examine pairwise comparisons. All statistical operations were performed in SPSS at the significance level of 0.05.

The repeated–measures ANOVA data revealed that for the test anxiety, group effect (p˂0.001; Eta=0.292), time effect (p˂0.001; Eta=0.345), and group×time interaction (p˂0.001; Eta=0.278) were significant. Concerning academic performance, the effect of group (p˂0.001; Eta=0.242), the effect of time (p˂0.001; Eta=0.429), and the interaction of group×time (p=0.010; Eta=0.162) were significant. Moreover, Benfroni posthoc test results indicated a significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group respecting the pretest and posttest (p˂0.001) as well as pretest and follow–up (p=0.142) for test anxiety and academic performance. The obtained results suggested the positive effect of CCP on reducing test anxiety (p=0.142) and increasing academic performance (p˂0.001) in primary school children at the follow–up phase.

CCP can diagnose undesired anxiety symptoms in children and use these symptoms as a guide to anxiety management to reduce educational disabilities and improve studentschr('39') academic performance.