Nur Ainani Fitria, 2013 Students’ Test Anxiety And Its Correlation With Their Academic Performance: A Study of
Undergraduate Students at a Private Higher Education Institution in Bandung Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia
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The battery of self report measures itself was employed in this study in the classroom; there were eight classes observed for this study and it was done in July
2012, specifically from 2
nd
to 5
th
of July, 2012.
3.4.2 A Semi-structured Interview
Considering the clarity of the self report measures and the characteristics of the participants investigated, a semi-structured interview was conducted. In this
study, to capture the richness and detail of test anxiety experienced by the students, a semi-structured interview was conducted on a one-to-one and face-to-
face basis and recorded as suggested by Silverman, 2005 to provide a permanent record. A semi-structured interview was considered to be the best to conduct in
this study because this type of interview lets the interviewer off to look into the interviewee to be more detailed in giving responses or to follow a line of inquiry
planned previously. The more responses interviewee gives, the higher possibility for the interviewer to get the data required Heigham and Croker, 2009.
Furthermore, this type of interview offers “sufficient flexibility to probe
some aspects in depth and, where necessary, to let the respondent lead in much the same way as in open interview
” Heigham and Croker, 2009, p. 186. In this regard, Merriam 1998, p. 74 says that the more flexibility the semi-structured
interview offers is because of the use of less structured questions. In line with this, Gall et al. 2003, p. 240 state that
“the semi-structured interview involves asking a series of structured questions and then probing more deeply using open-form
questions to obtain additional information. ” A list of questions that was
formulated for the interview can be seen in Appendix 4. To conduct a semi-structured interview, the interviewer focused on the
analysis of self reports of the students‟ test anxiety and recalled of how their test anxiety took place. Thus, based on the results of Spielberger‟s TAI 1980, two EFL
students who exhibited high test anxiety were interviewed according to a set of semi-structured questions to find out factors that have caused their test anxiety,
how strong was each of those causal factors of test anxiety for them, and how
Nur Ainani Fitria, 2013 Students’ Test Anxiety And Its Correlation With Their Academic Performance: A Study of
Undergraduate Students at a Private Higher Education Institution in Bandung Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia
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were their actions to each of those causal factors. In addition, two EFL students who exhibited moderate test anxiety and two EFL students who exhibited low test
anxiety were interviewed to compare with the highly anxious students. The time required for the interview ranged from 11 to 20 minutes.
The detail schedules for the interview can be seen as follows.
Table 3.1 The Detail Schedules for the Interview
No. StudentSubject
Date Duration
1. Student 1 a student with high
anxiety 1
st
of Oct, 2012 12:19 minutes
2. Student 2 a student with moderate
anxiety 2
nd
of Oct, 2012 20:24 minutes
3. Student 3 a student with low
anxiety 2
nd
of Oct, 2012 11:31 minutes
4. Student 4 a student with moderate
anxiety 2
nd
of Oct, 2012 15:51 minutes
5. Student 5 a student with low
anxiety 2
nd
of Oct, 2012 12:56 minutes
6. Student 6 a student with high
anxiety 4
th
of Oct, 2012 10:30 minutes
Henceforth, the interview data were interpreted to answer research problems and compared to the theory underpinning the study Emilia, 2008, p.
197. Aside from the battery of self report measures and semi-structured
interview as instruments of the study, a correlation analyses was used to determine the correlation between two variables. To show the correlation between two
variables more easily, as suggested by Hatch and Lazaraton 1991, p. 427, the value of one variable should be plotted against the other variable‟s value. In this
regard, the students‟ test anxiety levels would be the variable X, whereas their
academic performance would be the variable Y. These two variables, then, were calculated by using Spearman correlation. Spearman correlation was used in this
study because the data were not normally distributed. It was mentioned in Hatch and Lazaraton 1991, p. 451 that most statisticians argue for Spearman
Nur Ainani Fitria, 2013 Students’ Test Anxiety And Its Correlation With Their Academic Performance: A Study of
Undergraduate Students at a Private Higher Education Institution in Bandung Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia
| repository.upi.edu
| perpustakaan.upi.edu
correlation when the distribution is not normal. The following table illustrates the distribution of data.
Table 3.2 Tests of Normality
Kolmogorov-Smirnov
a
Shapiro-Wilk Statistic
df Sig.
Statistic df
Sig. Students academic
performance .266
93 .000
.813 93
.000
Students test anxiety .087
93 .080
.982 93
.218 a. Lilliefors Significance Correction
From Table 3.4, specifically Kolmogorov-Smirnov column, it could be seen that the significance value
of variable X students‟ test anxiety was 0.080, while the significance value
of variable Y students‟ academic performance was
0.000. Stated by Pallant 2011, p. 63, a result with Sig. value which is more than
0.05 indicates normality. Therefore, the variable X of this study was normally distributed. However, because the significance value of variable Y was smaller
than 0.05, it could be concluded that the data was not normally distributed.
3.5 Validity of the Instrument
