State Test Anxiety Scale (STAS)
A Valid and Reliable Measure for State-Level Test Anxiety in English
🧠 About STAS
The State Test Anxiety Scale (STAS) is a psychological measurement tool designed to assess state-level test anxiety based on the bio-psychosocial model. Developed and validated by Dr. Alper Şahin (2021) with a multinational sample from 22 countries (n=360), the STAS provides educators and researchers with a precise, culturally adaptive instrument for evaluating test anxiety specific to individual exam contexts, rather than as a general or trait-based tendency.
🌍 Why STAS Matters
Test anxiety has become a global concern, affecting between 25% and 40% of students across different education systems. Its negative influence on learning, performance, and self-confidence can distort test results and threaten the validity and reliability of educational measurement. Traditional scales often assess test anxiety as a general trait and fail to capture its situational and dynamic nature.
STAS fills this gap by allowing context-specific measurement—before each test—helping educators and researchers identify fluctuations in anxiety levels tied to particular exams, subjects, or learning environments.
⚙️ Distinctive Features
- Based on the latest bio-psychosocial model, integrating cognitive, physiological, and psychosocial aspects of test anxiety.
- Three subscales: Cognitive Effects (CE), Physiological Effects (PE), and Psychosocial Effects (PSE).
- Validated with multinational data: strong factorial stability confirmed via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (χ²/df = 1.94, CFI = .98, RMSEA = .05).
- High internal consistency: PEα = .81, PSEα = .77, CEα = .91, Totalα = .92.
- Proven linguistic equivalence with its Turkish version, DuSKÖ, ensuring reliability across languages and cultures.
- Applicable across disciplines—language, engineering, social sciences—and adaptable for educational and psychological research.
💼 Licensing and Access
The STAS is a licensed product of ASiMETRY and is available for academic and institutional use. Researchers, universities, and organizations wishing to use the STAS must obtain a usage license.
📘 Read the Publication
For detailed information on the development, validation, and psychometric analysis of STAS, access the full research article below:
📄 Citation
Şahin, A. (2021). Validation of a New State Test Anxiety Scale (STAS). International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education, 8(4), 872–887.
https://doi.org/10.21449/ijate.838622
