Abstract:

Aim: The aim of this research is to investigate the level of the anxiety of the students prior to exams and competitions participating to the competitions for high schools and secondary schools in Rize province. Material and Methods: First of all, we applied to provincial and district national education directorates in writing and gave information about the purpose of the study. The surveys were conducted prior to exams and competitions in the schools. Spielberger’s State Anxiety Inventory was used in order to determine the level of the students’ anxiety. In addition, some questions regarding personal information were added to the inventory. MS Excel for Windows was utilised for organising the data and for drawing graphics while SPSS for Windows (version 21) was used for statistical tests and MS Word 2013 for writing purposes. Normality tests of Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test and Shapiro-Wilk test were primarily executed for statistical analysis of the obtained data. As the dataset does not have a normal distribution, the non-parametric tests of Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test were performed. Besides, Pearson correlation analysis was applied so as to determine the degree and direction of the relations between the variables.   Results: The results showed that there is; a very weak correlation in the same direction between pre-exam and pre-competition anxiety scores of the secondary school students (r=0.147 p<0.05); very weak correlation in the same direction between pre-exam and pre-competition anxiety scores of the female students (r=0.245 P<0.05); very weak correlation in the same direction between pre-exam anxiety scores of female and male students (r=0.129 P<0.05); very weak correlation in the same direction between pre-exam and pre-competition anxiety scores of volleyball players (r=0.151 p<0.05)  Conclusion: According to the results, it is observed that the difference between pre-exam and pre-competition anxiety scores of the players-students with respect to school type, gender and sport branch was not significant.    

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