Investigating the relationship between exam anxiety level and perceived ego states of the high school students that prepare to take university entrance exams by going to private classroms

The main aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between exam anxiety and ego state that is perceived by the high school students at the 12th grade and prepare to take university entrance exams (YGS and LYS). In addition to this, the current study aims to investigate whether gender and ego states predict exam anxiety as well as to examine the dominant energy of the students from the sample size. The study group consists of 535 (307 female 228 male) students that study at 6 official Anatolian high schools which are in the city of Ankara and the county of Çankaya and are connected to the Ministry of Education in 2014-2015 education year. The age range of the students is 16-19 years old. The data was collected by using Ego State Scale: EDÖ (Arı, 1989), Exam Anxiety Scale: SKÖ (Öner, 1990) and a demographic questionnaire. The results revealed that the exam anxieties of the female students at the 12th grade are significantly higher than the male students. Furthermore, it was found that ego states and gender did not significantly predict exam anxiety and only the Adult Ego among the ego states predicted exam anxiety on a delusional dimension. Moreover, it was found that ego states were not significantly distributed with gender and the state ego energy of the students from the sample size are found to be protective parent ego states. The findings were discussed based on the previous literature and the suggestions for the future research were presented.The level of Significance at p <0.05 was adopted. Research statistical analysis in "SPSS 20.0 for Windows" program has been used and interpreted. Key words: Exam anxiety, Ego State, Ego Energy State