Invastigation of cognitive and metacognitive strategies and exam anxiety levels of 8th grade students

This study was conducted to investigate the cognitive and metacognitive strategies and exam anxiety levels of 8th grade students. The study was designed with the correlational research design, one of the quantitative research methods. The population of the study is Mersin Province; 8th grade students of the official secondary schools in the central districts of Yenişehir, Mezitli, Akdeniz and Toroslar. The selection of students to represent the scope of the study was carried out by cluster sampling method. In the first semester of 2018-2019 academic year, the study group consisted of 350 students (188 female, 162 male) in 8 selected with cluster sampling classes of each of 14 public secondary schools in Yenişehir district of Mersin. In this research; 'Personal Information Form' and 'Motivation and Learning Strategies Scale' were used. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 21 the package program was used to analyze the data. Data were analyzed with Independent Group t- Test, Descriptive Statistics (mean, standard deviation) and Pearson Correlation Analysis. As a result of the research, it was seen that all students mostly used metacognitive strategies, then they used critical thinking, repetition, cognitive, refinement, regulation strategies and the study also showed that their exam anxiety levels were high. Besides, it was found out that female students ' anxiety levels were higher than male students' anxiety levels. According to the study, Female students use their cognitive, metacognitive, repetition and regulation strategy levels more than male students; it was also seen that female and male students used refinement and critical thinking strategies in a similar way. There was no negative or positive relationship between the test anxiety levels of the students and the repetition, detailing, regulation and critical thinking strategy levels which are the sub- dimensions of metacognitive, cognitive and cognitive strategies; It has been concluded that there are positive significant relationships between repetition, refinement, regulation and critical thinking strategy levels which are sub- dimensions of metacognitive, cognitive and cognitive strategies. Keywords: Test anxiety, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies