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Studies suggest that there is a shortage of minorities entering the professions of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This is especially the case with African American males. Several factors that impact this phenomenon are discussed in this chapter, but chiefly the impact of test anxiety and test bias on the absence of African American men in STEM. These factors are significant because society dictates that we embrace the use of tests to determine ability. However, many individuals, including African American males, suffer from test anxiety and are victims of test bias. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics are areas that rely heavily on tests results. Therefore, the impact of test anxiety and test bias as a prohibitory method of denying access to minorities, especially African American males, is worthy of investigation and discussion. The chapter explores this relationship of test anxiety and test bias to the absence of African American males in STEM. It also looks at the importance of historically Black colleges and universities in adding African American males to STEM fields. Plausible solutions to the problem are also provided.

The study’s objective was to ascertain the connection between secondary school students' test anxiety, academic self-concept, motivation and academic performance in mathematics. The difference between the academic performances of male and female secondary school students who exhibit high and low test anxiety, academic self-concept and motivation levels in mathematics.

Four hypotheses and four research questions were adopted. The design is a correlation. 42,299 mathematics students in senior school year two (SS2) made up the research population. A sample of 1,650 students was selected through a multi-stage sampling procedure. The main instruments used were the Mathematics Test Anxiety Questionnaire (MTAQ), Academic Self-Concept Questionnaire (ASQ) and Academic Motivation Questionnaire (AMQ) and students’ math scores. These instruments were validated by three experts and the reliability coefficients of 0.69, 0.68 and 0.68 were obtained for MTAQ, ASQ and AMQ, respectively, using Cronbach alpha. Pearson product moment correlation was used to analyze the data.

The study’s results showed a correlation between secondary school students' academic performance in mathematics and test anxiety, academic self-concept and motivation. There was a significant difference between secondary school male and female students' test anxiety; there was a significant difference between secondary school male and female students' self-concept and academic performance in mathematics, and there was a significant difference between secondary school male and female students' motivation and academic performance in mathematics.

The major contribution of this study is to investigate the connection between test anxiety, academic self-concept motivation and students’ mathematics performance. There is a difference between psychological variables, gender and mathematics performance.

In this chapter, we examine the reflexive interplay of cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives to examine more completely the ways in which successful and normative participation in schooling signals the ability and opportunity to participate in life beyond the institution.

Using narrative analysis techniques, we analyzed the interviews of eight college students who described their experiences with test anxiety.

Each individual story and experience points to the ebb and flow of participation and exclusion in the activities of schooling as well as a full participant in life more broadly. Significantly, we find that what it means to be a successful student in higher education has bearing on what it means to be a productive and worthwhile citizen, daughter, son, and partner.

This research adds needed complexity to the study of test anxiety by highlighting the ways in which higher education settings rely on the medical model of disability to enact their own gatekeeping mechanisms in an effort to “legitimize” disability through acknowledgment and accommodation. Findings point to the ways in which culturally circulating stories of disability can shape organizational responses and how these can shape personal experience.

This investigation was intended to examine the relationship among perceived competence, anxiety, and mathematical and verbal achievement in a population of male and female Italian middle school students. One hundred and eighty students were administered measures of trait anxiety, and measures of state anxiety were administered immediately prior to administering achievement tests in math and literature. In addition, students were administered six subscales of a perceived competence scale. Analyses of these data yielded a moderate negative correlation between mathematics achievement and state anxiety for the math test, and a descriptively smaller negative correlation between the literature scores and state anxiety for the literature test. Significant correlations were also observed between achievement and perceived competence for academic ability. The two state anxiety measures were found to be highly correlated; however, trait anxiety was not statistically related to academic achievement in either math or literature. A moderate negative correlation was observed between perceived competence for academic ability and state anxiety for math and a somewhat lower correlation between perceived competence for academic ability and literature achievement. Males scored higher than females on the test of trait anxiety; however, females and males did not differ on any other anxiety or academic measures, including perceived competence for academic ability, math achievement, or literature achievement. Implications for future research are discussed.

This pilot study aims to examine the prevalence of test anxiety and its interplay with attitudes, confidence, efficacy, academic performance and socio-demographic factors within the domain of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses.

The authors employed a quantitative, cross-sectional design with 549 sixth-grade students from public lower secondary schools in Prishtina, Kosovo, using the Student Attitudes Toward STEM Survey (S-STEM) for middle/high schools and the test anxiety questionnaire.

Over 70% of Kosovo's sixth-grade students reported moderate to severe test anxiety. The age of students was found to be inversely related to academic performance in STEM. The father's employment was associated with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence, efficacy and academic performance. Having a personal study environment was connected with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM, whereas access to technology was associated with positive academic performance. Test anxiety, academic performance and personal study space predicted students' attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM and 21st-century learning.

Educational institutions should prioritize student well-being. By addressing test anxiety, these institutions can create supportive learning environments that improve attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM fields. These efforts are crucial for STEM career development and student success in the 21st-century workforce.

The current study findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing STEM student engagement and performance, highlighting the importance of addressing test anxiety for positive learning outcomes while emphasizing the need to consider socio-economic and contextual factors in education.

This paper considers the association between instruction style and student academic performance, and draws from recent laboratory research where accounting student performance was found to be closely associated with the effect of instructor behaviour upon student task motivation and deep learning. Drawing upon emergent motivation theory, we discuss the proposition that appropriate instructor behaviours, through their positive effect upon student task motivation, anxiety and emergent confidence, can induce an upward performance shift, or interrupt a downward shift. A performance spiral model is modelled whereby students carry with them the learning responses from repeated good (or poor) performance into subsequent task settings, with corresponding accentuated effects upon anxiety and motivation.

The use of exercise as an intervention to improve health in the general population is well documented. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an exercise referral scheme can be an effective health promotion tool for male prisoners in Ireland, presenting with mental health symptoms.

This mixed methods study with a pre- and post-intervention design was conducted in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, which has a capacity for approximately 790 prisoners. Reliable and validated symptom assessment scales were used to assess levels of depression, anxiety, stress, self-esteem and anger amongst a sample of 40 prisoners pre- and post-intervention. The scales used were the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scale or DASS-42 (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995), the Novaco Anger Scale (Novaco, 1994), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965) and the Zung Self-Rated Anxiety Scale (Zung, 1971). Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with a subset of the participants post-intervention to further test and contextualise the symptom ratings. The data gathered from the self-rating scales were imported into SPSS 22 for statistical testing for significance. Wilcoxon’s signed-rank test was then used to measure significance of changes. Thematic analysis was performed on the qualitative data.

In the post-intervention, significant levels of improvement were achieved in the levels of depression, anxiety (DASS), anxiety (Zung), stress, anger, and self-esteem for 29 of the 30 prisoners who completed the study. The incidence of normal mood scores rose from 33 to 90 per cent after the intervention; the incidence of extremely severe scores for anxiety changed from 40 to 7 per cent, severe stress scores changed from 27 to 3 per cent, normal stress levels rose from 17 to 73 per cent, marked anger ratings reduced from 40 to 3 per cent and low self-esteem levels reduced from 20 per cent of participants pre-intervention to 7 per cent post-intervention. In the main, participants perceived the experiences and outcomes of the intervention positively.

There are some limitations to the design of this study. Operational circumstances within the prison at the start of this study prevented the authors from accessing a larger sample. A control group would add greatly to the study but this was not possible within a single prison setting. The possible influence of extraneous variables such as increased attention and social contact, and more time out of one’s cell may have contributed to improved symptom scores as much as the exercise intervention in this study. This possibility was recognised from the outset but the authors proceeded because the aim was to test if an exercise referral package (and all that inevitably goes with that) would make a difference for symptomatic prisoners.

The organisation and smooth running of the intervention and the positive results therein underpinned the practicality of this project. The significantly positive results contribute new knowledge to the profile of Irish male prisoners’ mental health.

This study could be the foundation for a larger study or set of studies which should include a control group and one or more female prisoner cohorts. The impact of positive changes in prisoners’ mental health on the prison staff and environment could also be researched. This type of study could lead to important social implications in relation to its impact on prisoner rehabilitation.

This study was the first of its kind to explore the effectiveness of exercise referral as a health promotion intervention for Irish male prisoners presenting with mental health symptoms.

Despite concerns about digital privacy, little is known about emotional distress about data hacking and surveillance incidents. The purpose of this paper is to examine variables predicting anxiety about data hacking, and the role that such anxiety and other potentially important variables have in explaining the use of digital privacy protection behavior.

In total, 305 participants from an online labor market were sampled who frequently use the internet, surveyed about recent anxiety (using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale (GAD-7)), anxiety about data hacking (GAD-7, in reference to data hacking), and issues of digital privacy: news exposure, perceived importance, self-efficacy, protection behavior, and previous hacking victimization.

Profession (information technology-related) moderated the symptom structure for recent anxiety, but not data hacking anxiety. Using structural equation modeling, prior hacking victimization predicted anxiety about hacking. Digital privacy protection behavior was related to hacking anxiety and privacy self-efficacy. Data hacking anxiety mediated relations between hacking victimization and privacy protection. Privacy self-efficacy mediated relations between news exposure to hacking incidents and privacy protection.

Limitations include the self-report nature of the instruments, and use of a selective, non-random sample.

Results highlight knowledge, self-efficacy, and threat appraisal among IT managers in motivating better digital security practices.

This is the first study using a standardized instrument of anxiety to examine distress about hacking and predictors of digital privacy protection behavior.

To deepen our understanding about the development of turnover intention, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model based on the stress theory to explain cross-country differences in the formation of turnover intention, complementing previous literature that mainly emphasizes the effect of monetary compensation on turnover intention without taking into account anxiety and pressure.

Empirical testing of this model by investigating personnel across Taiwan’s and Indonesia’s banks confirms the applicability of stress theory in cross-cultural business management. Of the 161 Chinese-language questionnaires distributed to the employees from the three large banks in Taiwan, 137 usable questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 85 percent. At the same time, of the 234 Indonesian-language questionnaires distributed to the employees from the two large banks in Indonesia, 219 usable questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 93.6 percent.

This research reveals that mental disengagement fully mediates the indirect relationship between performance-related anxiety and turnover intention, while positive reinterpretation fully mediates the indirect relationship between work pressure and turnover intention. Furthermore, the effects of performance-related anxiety and work pressure on turnover intention are moderated by cross-country differences.

First, the finding concerning the full mediating role of mental disengagement complements prior justifications of the conservation of resources theory. Second, the finding of this study regarding the full mediating role of positive reinterpretation complements the previous findings of Taylor’s (1983) theory of cognitive adaptation, which conceptualizes employees as active agents in restoring the psychological equilibrium in the aftermath of a competitive pressurized event.

COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the well-being and the psychological resilience of different populations, particularly in the addiction field. This study aims to assess anxiety and its severity among patients and staff from different types of addiction services in Israel during this emergency.

The study was conducted during the period from March–July 2020. Participants included patients and staff (N = 282) from three different types of addiction services, were administered the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the multi-dimensional scale of perceived social support and demographic variables. In addition, a logistic regression model was applied to identify predictors of state anxiety by using statistical package for the social sciences software.

The results show that therapeutic communities clients reported more social support compared to other subjects. State anxiety has a positive strong correlation with trait anxiety both among patients and staff, and it was found as a crucial predictor of state anxiety in the regression equation. There is no statistically significant correlation between state anxiety and social support, gender or education among clients and staff as one. The state anxiety remains relatively stable and characterizes most people, staff and patients, men and women, medical staff members and other professionals.

The current study has some contributions to the addiction field by understanding the psychological distress of a vulnerable population: substance users in treatment settings. The study population relied on convenient samples and future studies should be planned using a cross-sectional design and should take into account substance use measures. The findings are reinforcing the assumption that state anxiety was likely to increase during the coronavirus pandemic.

Adequate services should be planned to avoid relapse or mental deterioration of people who use drugs during health emergencies.

The research points out the unique and real difficulties of SUD clients, as well as the complexity and risks in their staff members’ works. The authors also saw that staff members need attention and maintenance; they are in the front line.