Developing and Validation of the Anxiety Coping during Tests Scale

Coping strategies are a useful tool to regulate the anxiety experienced in evaluative situations. Based on that, the objective of this study was to develop a scale to measure the use of strategies in order to cope anxiety during tests, delimiting those which allow to continue solving the test. The developed instrument was applied to 184 people (101 women, 82 men and 1 unidentified person with these categories (Mage = 17.27, SD = 0.70) and it considered the experiences in the admission test to a University. The Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling showed a three-factor structure, which represented the strategies: acceptance, putting into perspective and active coping. Each factor defined a subscale, which presented evidence of reliability: acceptable internal consistencies and significant test-retest correlations. Favorable evidence of validity was provided through the analysis of experts, structural equation analysis, gender differences, and partial correlations with test anxiety. It was concluded that the proposed scale is suitable to measure the coping with during tests.