The analysis of the relation among test anxiety, perfectionism and the attitudes of parents of the secondary students who will pass placement test (SBS)

The main purpose of this study is to determine whether the perfectionist personality traits and the attitudes of parents of secondary students predict their test anxiety. Additionally, other purposes of the study is to examine the test anxieties of secondary students in terms of various types of school, grades, socio-economic status, educational levels of parents and sex differences.The sample of the research consisted of 723 secondary students studying at 6th. 7th. and 8th. grades. The data related with the test anxieties of the students were gathered by ?Test Anxiety Inventory? (Öner, 1990); data related with the attitudes of parents were gathered by ?Parenting Styles Scale? (Sümer & Güngör, 1999); data related with the perfectionism were gathered by ?Positive and Negative Perfectionism Scale? (Kırdök, 2004) and lastly the data related with the demographic variables were gathered by ?Personal Information Form? designed by the researcher.In the study, whether the attitudes of parents together with the perfectionist personality traits (those were independent variables) predicted the test anxieties of the students (that was the dependent variable) was determined by the use of multicollinearity in regression analysis. Besides, in the study T-test was used to see whether the test anxiety levels of the students changed in terms of school types (private schools and state schools) and different sexes; and also to see whether there was a meaningful difference between the test anxiety levels of the students and various socioeconomic status and the education of parents, one-criterion variance analysis was used.Results suggested that positive and negative perfectionism, the acceptance and concern shown by mother were meaningful predictors of total scores obtained from the test anxiety scale. It was also seen that the higher level of positive perfectionism, the acceptance and concern shown by mother was, the lower the total score of test anxiety was. At the same time, the lower level of positive perfectionism was, the higher the total score of test anxiety was also observed. Similarly positive and negative perfectionisms, acceptance and concern shown by mother were found to be meaningful predictors of score about delusion sub dimension. The results indicated that as the level of positive perfectionist and acceptance/concern perceived by mother rise, the score of delusion about test anxiety decreased; as the scores of negative perfectionisms rise, the score of delusion about test anxiety rise. However, in the study negative perfectionism was seen to be a meaningful predictor of the affective sub dimension scores which were obtained from test anxiety scale. It was suggested that as the scores of negative perfectionisms rise, test anxiety affective sub dimension scores rise, too.The results suggested that the total score of test anxiety, delusion sub dimension and affective sub dimension scores did not change significantly in term of the school types (private school, state school), socio economic status and the education level of the parents of the students. Also, total scores of test anxiety and affective sub dimension scores didn?t change in terms of the grades, but delusion sub dimension scores were found to be quite high on behalf of the 8th graders. The findings showed that the girls? total of test anxiety scores, delusion sub dimension scores and affective sub dimension scores were significantly higher than the boys?.Keywords: Test anxiety, positive perfectionism, negative perfectionism, attitudes of parents.