Investigation of exam questions enriched with visual materials in terms of various variables and determination of student opinions

In this study, whether exam anxiety scores and exam scores of secondary school students from exams which include visually enriched questions and from exams which do not include visual materials differ according to gender or not were investigated. In addition, student opinions were determined in terms of test anxiety and exam difficulty depending on the questions being enriched with visual materials or not. As data collection tools, Test Anxiety Scale and Academic Achievement Tests were used. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students. The study group consisted of 28 students (20 boys, 8 girls) studying in the 8th grade of Karadere Secondary School associated with Ministry of National Education in central Adapazarı district in the first semester of 2014-2015 academic year. The study group was selected according to the appropriate sampling method. In this study, concurrent embedded design, one of the mixed method research designs, was used. "Pearson Correlation" and "t-Test for Dependent Samples"were used to test quantitative research problems due to the normal distribution of data. The qualitative part of the study was designed as a case study. "Content Analysis" was usedto analyse the data obtained from the case study. The results of the analysis of quantitative data of the study showed that there was statistically no significant difference between the student scores from the exams including visually enriched questions and the student scores from the exams including questions without visual material. In addition, it was determined that there was no significant difference between the mean scores of the students from the examswith regard to their gender. According to another result, it was observed that there was statistically no significant difference between the test anxiety scores of male and female students. However, it was observed that there was a positive and moderate significant relationship between the anxiety scores of the students before the exam and the first exam success scores. Yet, there was no significant relationship between the other test anxiety scores and success scores. According to the results of the analysis of the qualitative part of the study, all of the students stated that they felt nervous during the examif questions did not include visual materials. They also stated that they felt more comfortable in answering visually enriched questions. Additionally, 92% of the students stated that they thought they could not solve the questions during the exam when they saw no visual material. Besides, 96.88% of the students stated that they thought they could get a good mark when they saw visually enriched questions. Moreover, 96.55% of the students stated that they had difficulty in answering the questions that did not include visual materials. Furthermore, 92.86% of the students stated that they easily answered visually enriched questions. In addition, 93.1% of the students stated that using some visual materials facilitates the questions. Key Words: Academic achievement, Gender, Science lesson, Secondary school students, Test anxiety, Visual materials.