Evaluation of the relationship of student motivation and exam anxiety in university students

Motivation is a concept that is used a lot in daily life and is needed in many areas. Motivation is an internal state that activates, directs the individual, and causes him to continue his behavior. Motivation is the state of internal and external strengthening in order to reach a goal, and as the intended goal becomes meaningful, the person continues that behavior to achieve his goal. Exam anxiety is a feeling that occurs in childhood and increases with the student period in later ages and shows its negative effect in proportion to its amount. Negative criticism, comparison and discipline in the school environment, which is manifested by excessive authoritarian and restrictive parenting at home at very young ages, creates an environment conducive to an increase in test anxiety. Frequent school failures, negative evaluations by adults, and the sense of threat to the self that such situations evoke in the individual are important factors in the development of test anxiety. Today, almost every student has some problems with test anxiety. This anxiety experienced by the students causes them to forget the subjects they have studied before, especially while answering the questions during the exam. As the literature research shows, a high level of motivation leads to a decrease in test anxiety. In this context, it is aimed to conduct a research on students studying at foundation universities operating in Istanbul. This research is a descriptive cross-sectional study. Besides being a descriptive and cross-sectional research, it also has a quantitative research design. In the research, a questionnaire consisting of 3 parts was used as a data collection tool. These are the personal information form, the motivation scale and the test anxiety scale. The data to be obtained through the questionnaire forms were analyzed using SPSS 23.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that the motivation levels and exam anxiety of the students differ according to their gender and daily sleep time. On the other hand, according to the relationship and effect analyzes, it was determined that the motivation levels of university students affected test anxiety.