Anxiety in Elementary School Children: A Report of Research

The project produced two scales: the Test Anxiety Scale for Children (TASC) and the General Anxiety Scale for Children (GASC). The TASC consists of 30 items concerning attitudes toward and experiences in test and test-like situations, while the GASC measures broader anxiety content [citation:2]. Both scales were appended to the 1960 volume, making them publicly available for subsequent research [citation:1]. The TASC became the most widely used measure of children's test anxiety, at least in the United States, and was adapted for cross-cultural use in Japanese, Spanish, and other samples [citation:2][citation:6]. The scales were designed with reference to a Freudian concept of anxiety, treating it as partly situation-specific and having somatic manifestations [citation:10].

The central finding was that anxious children's problem-solving efficiency is unusually dependent on the interpersonal context. Sarason and colleagues concluded that the anxious child is 'more vulnerable because he is more dependent on how other people structure their relationship with him' [citation:15]. This means anxious children perform differently depending on 'what is presented' and 'how it is presented' to them, more so than low-anxious children [citation:15]. The research also examined 'interfering and facilitating effects of anxiety,' suggesting that anxiety is not uniformly detrimental—its effects depend on the nature of the task and the testing situation [citation:3]. This contextual sensitivity distinguished the project's approach from purely trait-based conceptions of anxiety.

Chapter 8 reports interviews with parents of high and low anxious children, and the authors describe an unanticipated finding: 'there is a significant discrepancy between mothers and fathers in their ratings of their children' [citation:15]. Furthermore, interview data from mothers of high-anxious children contained distortions that, if undetected, would mask expected findings [citation:15]. The authors explicitly note the significance of this for child development research: many studies relied on mothers' reports only, with no means for detecting defensiveness during interviews [citation:15]. This finding challenged methodological assumptions in the field and argued for multi-source assessment of children's behavior and emotional states.

Charles D. Smock's review in Contemporary Psychology described the book's major purpose as integrating six years of research on the functional relationship of test anxiety to intellectual efficiency, with implications for psychological and educational practices. He noted the theoretical framework was developed 'à la Freudian' and that the volume included derivation of hypotheses concerning anxiety's role in modifying learning and problem solving. The review highlighted the scales' development and validity studies as the 'major substantive core'. Boyd R. McCandless reviewed the book in the American Educational Research Journal [citation:16], and additional reviews appeared in Educational and Psychological Measurement [citation:4]. The book was recognized as providing broad coverage of research methodology in child development.

The TASC became the most widely used measure of children's test anxiety in the United States, with extensive research on its psychometric properties over the following decades [citation:2]. However, its unidimensionality was challenged. Dunn (1964) identified four factors: test anxiety, recitation anxiety, physiological arousal in anticipated recitation situations, and broad-based school anxiety [citation:2]. Feld and Lewis (1967) confirmed a four-factor structure labelled test anxiety, somatic signs of anxiety, comparative poor self-evaluation, and remote school concern [citation:2]. Bayuk and Proger (1971) found the four-factor solution 'most meaningful psychologically' and questioned the unidimensional interpretation [citation:10]. Later research suggested the TASC might measure a broad construct of 'academic anxiety' rather than test anxiety narrowly [citation:2].

Anxiety in Elementary School Children is the origin point for Sarason's career-long concern with how institutional contexts shape individual functioning. The finding that anxious children are more dependent on how adults structure relationships with them anticipates his later argument that schools have their own cultures and regularities that resist change. His final chapter on 'Implications for Education' explicitly goes beyond the data to draw conclusions about psychological procedures in public schools, a pattern he would repeat in later books [citation:1]. The book also established his practice of spending extensive time in school settings, which informed The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change and his later critiques of teacher preparation in Teaching as a Performing Art.