Comparison of Self-efficacy , Test Anxiety and Competitiveness between Students of Top Private Schools and Public Schools

This study compared the self-efficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness in top private1 and public2 high schools students by using Ex Post FactoResearch. The sample population consisted of 338 second grade math and physics high school students (172 males and 166 females) in Tehran, who were selected through Multi-stage cluster sampling.To measure the self-efficacy, it was used, Self-efficacy questionnaire for children (Muris, 2001), to measurethe test anxiety, it was used, Test anxiety inventory (Tai, 1992) and to measure the competitiveness it was used, Winning, mastery and performance questionnaire (Franken, 1994).The results showed that general self-efficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness were higher in TPS students (emotional and academic self-efficacy were higher and there was no significant difference for social self-efficacy). Compare to boys and girls, in terms of competitiveness and self-efficacy; boys earn higher scores and in test anxiety girls had higher grades (in terms of academic and social self-efficacy, there were no significant differences between them but in emotional selfefficacy boys were at a higher level). It can be said that: both strategies and management practices were efficient in selfefficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness of students and also the students are attracted to these schools that have these features more.


Introduction
In today's world everybody faces stress in everyday life and no one can escape from pressures of competition with others in sport, education, professional fields and other contexts,inevitably, he tries to meet the demands and requirements of modern life.In many cases due to limited resources and multitude of applicants, one is forced to compete for getting some external goals, such as winning in a competition, getting good grades in school, promoting job or putting on absolute spotlight of others.In some cases the inner motives and desiresbrought him to competition.In such an environment, the goal of the students is to show their superior capability.So instead the emphasis is on the attempt, it is on the ability and the ability and susceptibility takes the value (Feshbach & Weiner,1991).According to Bandura (1997) self-efficacy is defined as: perceptions of students from the ability to successfully resolve the issue, learning the activities or perform them on a desire level.Studies have shown that mental health and human well-being requires an optimistic sense of self-efficacy (Maciejewski et al.,2000).A strong sense of efficacy leads to a high level of motivation, academic achievements and interests growth in educational issues (Pajares&Schunk, 2001).Ashby & Kathryn (2007) reported that high efficacy in talented students is related to a number of behaviors such as; enhancement of social harmony, 1 abbreviated by TPS 2 abbreviated by PS ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences MCSER Publishing, No 23 November 2014 2750 improvement of interpersonal relations and social and academic skills, vice versalow efficacy in ordinary students is a major contribution to personal, social and educational problems.
Another variable studied in this research is test anxiety.Anxiety is a very common phenomenon in psychological studies, which has been researched for many years and in fact it is the most common reaction to stress (Sarason,1984).McKee (2007) showed that students in all levels of academic achievements and intellectual abilities can be affected by test anxiety.Test anxiety leads to behavioral, physical and phenomenological reactions along with the test (Zeidner, 2007).Hemberee (1988) reported that there is a negative correlation between test anxiety and success in IQ, intelligence, memory and problem solving tests.Biabangard (1999) reported that students with low level of test anxiety have better performance in difficult examsthan the easy ones, while the performance of students with moderate test anxiety is contrary; finally students with high level of test anxiety, have low function in both hard and easy exams.Since the students are the main assets of the country, especially the families, in this researchthe effort has been paid to the effect of these three factors and consequently, school administrators and education policymakers pay special attention to it.Due to the impact of training of self-efficacy promotion and its role in enhancing and improving the quality of mental and physical lather of life, its important seems great and urgent.On the other hand anxiety management training and consequentlycontrolling test anxiety by students and also having a compiled program that focus on practical solutions, to controlling and reducing it, seems necessary.Finally with regards to the positive and negative aspects of competitiveness, informing school administrators of the results of these researches will be constructive and useful.

Method
This research wasCorrelational.The sample included all male and female students who were studying in second grade mathematics and physics high schools in Tehran In the academic year 2013-2014.From twenty-two districts in Tehran three regions were selected randomly.In this study, sampling was done at 16 high schools,It includes 338 students; 177 students from TPSs (52%) and 161 students from PSs (48%), which were 172 male (51%) and 166 female (49%).

Test Anxiety Inventory:
Anxiety scale has been made by Abolghasemi et al (1996).This questionnaire consists of twenty five items and grading based on Likert scale four options; never = 0; rarely=1; sometimes =2; often =3.Cronbach's alpha was for all students a=0/78, male students a=0 /75 and female students a=0 /79.

Self-efficacy Questionnaire for children and adolescents:
This questionnaire has been made by Muris in 2001 to assess the self-efficacy of children and adolescents.thisquestionnaire consists of twenty three items, comprising three subtests; social (the first eight items to assess the ability to communicate with peers, decisiveness and achievingto social criteria), academic (the second eight items to assess the abilityto manage learning behaviors, mastery of curriculum and to meet the academic expectations) and emotional(the final seventh itemsto assess the ability to control and dealing with negative emotions) self-efficacy.Grading is based on Likert scale five options; 1=never up to 5=very much.We used Persian version this Scale.Total reliability scale was70% and for social, academic and emotional efficacy, respectively78%, 87% and 80%.

Competitiveness/Mastery Questionnaire
This questionnaire has been made by Franken in 1995.We used Persian version this Scale, the revised 22 items Persianquestionnaire consists of 19 questions of the Franken CMQ and 3 items have been added from Franken WCMP questionnaireand grading based on Likert scale five options; 1=it is never like me up to 5= it is completely like me.To assess the reliability and validity further researches are required.

Results
Table 1 shows, Mean, Standard Deviation andVariance Analysis (ANOVA) for three examined variables in terms of type of the school and gender.ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences The results in Table 1 indicate that test anxiety, competitiveness, and self-efficacy in students of TPSs are higher than PSs students.On the other hand, given that the variable self-efficacy is composed of three dimensions, to study the differences between school types and dimensions of this variable we usedanalysis of variance.The results are in the table below: The results of table 2 show that the academic and emotional self-efficacy in TPSs is superior.There is no significant difference for social self-efficacy among students of TPSs and PSs.Data from the three variables of self-efficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness according to gender as follows: According to the above table there are significant differences between self-efficacy and competitiveness of female and male students.That is, the self-efficacy and competitiveness of male students are higher than female students, but the test anxiety level in female students is higher than male students.Now consider the dimensions of self-efficacy in Table 4 according to gender: In terms of academic and social self-efficacy, there were no significant differences between male and female students, but emotional self-efficacy of male students is higher than female students.ISSN 2039-9340 (print) Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences MCSER Publishing, Rome-Italy Vol 5 No 23 November 2014 2752

Discussion
The results showed that: general self-efficacyis higher in TPS students.This study isaligned with the researches performed by Karadamas & Azizi, 2004;Schwarzer & Fuchs,1995;Kim, 2003 andAbedini, 2010, which reflect the relationship between self-efficacy and academic achievements.AlsoPope, 1989;Stajkovic&Luthans, 1998 confirmed the relationship between self-efficacy and high school grades.Malpassetal (1999) have shown that emotional self-efficacy strongly affects the intensity of concern and concerns affect the academicachievements of students.Kim, 2003 believed that talented students in dealing with different situations so that they can control their environment, so it is that sense of self efficacy and personal satisfaction provided.Freeman,1983 showed that there is positive and significant relationship between self-efficacy and academic success, resulting in stress and anxiety in this group of students is reduced.According to the present research, it was concluded that the academic efficacy of TPS students is higher thanpublic schoolstudents.Haret al ( 2001) and Bandoraet al (1996) found that academic self-efficacy has positive relationship with positive social relationship and social performance in school.According to the present research, it was concluded that competitiveness is higher in TPS students than public school students.Daneshpajooh (1993) showed that top students believe that, academic competitions, creating competition and trying to be encouraging and further increase knowledge, speed, confidence and knowledge of how information is,and in learning the material and become familiar with exam questions has animpressiveeffect.Harackiewicset al (1997) showed that Competitive motivation has positive impact on students' scores.But Stapel & Kooman (2005) believed that competition usually leads to conflict and cooperation to replication.Van &Janssen(2002) found that People with high competitiveness,have little time for leisure and socializing,hence the sense of happiness reduces in them.On the other hand compettition among different communities have different meanings (Grum & Kolence, 2008).Students from individual countries, know thecompetition,in educationalsettings more negative with no results found, but students from a collectivist society, see the competition more positive, which can leads to progress (Fulop, 2005).Important thing is; to generalize the results obtained in the West to the East should be treated with caution (Kinget al., 2012).According to the findings, it was concluded that test anxiety in TPS students are higher than public schools students.Onyeizugbo (2010) and Mohammadyari (2012) have been confirmed the negative impact of test anxiety on academic achievements.On the other hand researchers such asHolms (2001) believed that, test anxiety make people better prepare for study.But one thing that is noteworthy is that selfefficacy indicates a stronger positive association with academic achievement than test anxiety (Hattie et al., 2009 andKadivar, 2007.According to the present study it was concluded that the efficacy of male students is higher than female students.Pintrich and DeGroot (1990 )found that boys and girls have equal confidence in primary school, but in high school, boys have more.On the other hand Shyuand Hung (1999) examining relationship between academic self-efficacy and academic achievements in high school senior students concluded that there is no significant difference in academic self-efficacyof boys and girls.The results showed that competitiveness is higher among male students than female students.There have been conflicting views on competition (Ezheiet al., 1995).According to Frankenand Brown, 1992 the competitive motivations between females and males are differentandthe number of extractedfactors are more in male subjects.Sutter and Rutzler (2010) confirmed that gender differences in competitive behaviors are determined in the early years of life.Roy and Benenson (2002) found that females interfere in competitive interactions only when the resources are very few and limited whilemales are used to this kind of competition.But according to Ericsson et al., (2009) there is no significant difference between boys and girls in demands of competitive environment.The result of present study is consistent with research of Pajares&Kranzle (2002) and Akrami (1999),which test-anxiety is higher in girls than boys.The interesting thing is that academic achievements of female students have more predictive power with test anxiety and for male students with self-efficacy (Mohammadyari, 2012).On the other hand the correlation between test anxiety and academic achievements among girls in different disciplines was significant, but in boys, it is significant only in the field of science and not in humanities and math (Shoeiry,2004).The last point that should be noted is thatmost psychological theories such as Bandura's theory represents a Western perspective and are derived from individualistic values,it isessentially to be accurately considered to use these theories in a collectivist culture, like Iran (Mortazavi, 2004).Each study has limitations and limitation of the present study were at first; a lot of questions that could lead to reduced accuracy of the subjects, second; The study was limited to three regions in Tehranand finally; lack of backgrounds connected entirely with research topic.

Table 1 .
The Mean,standard deviation and variance analysis ofself-efficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness.

Table 2 .
The mean and variance analysis on the dimensions of self efficacy

Table 3 .
The mean and variance analysis on efficacy, test anxiety and competitiveness according to sex

Table 4 .
The mean score of academic, social and emotional self-efficacy according to gender