Identifying Patterns of Appraising Tests in First-Year College Students: Implications for Anxiety and Emotion Regulation During Test Taking Heather A. Davis North Carolina State University Christine DiStefano University of South Carolina–Columbia Paul A. Schutz University of Texas–San Antonio The authors explored patterns of appraising tests in a large sample of 1st-year college students. Cluster analysis was used to identify homogeneous groups of 1st-year students who shared similar patterns of cognitive appraisals about testing. The authors internally validated findings with an independent sample from the same population of students and examined the extent to which cluster membership differentiated undergraduates on the basis of external indicators (e.g., anxiety, emotion-regulation strategies, and achievement). The authors used 2 randomly drawn samples to conduct an initial cluster analysis (n = 1,107) and to replicate the solution on a 2nd, independent cluster and cross-classification analysis (n = 1,108). There may be 5 subtypes of test takers who differ in how they approach tests, their experience of anxiety, and how they manage problems that occur during test taking. Theoretical implications for emotion and emotion regulation, as well as practical implications for working with undergraduates who experience test anxiety, are discussed. Keywords: test taking, test anxiety, emotion regulation, cognitive appraisals, coping Emotions, such as those experienced during testing, have been the subject of considerable theoretical and empirical work in the past 20 years (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988, Lazarus, 1999; Schutz & Davis, 2000; Schutz & Pekrun, 2007). This interest has emerged, in part, because of the roles that emotion and emotional regulation play in self-directed behavior. In terms of the research on emotions and emotional regulation, the area of test taking has received the most attention (Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002; Schutz & Pekrun 2007). The main focus of this research has been on the nature of test anxiety (e.g., Hodapp & Benson, 1997; Sarason & Sarason, 1990; Zeidner, 1998, 2007) and on how students cope or regulate their anxiety during the testing process (Carver & Scheier, 2000; Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Kondo, 1997; Zeidner, 1998). This research has contributed to the understanding of emotion and emotional regulation during test taking and to the development of a context-specific, valid, and reliable measure of emotional regu- lation during test taking (Schutz, Benson, & DeCuir, in press; Schutz, DiStefano, Benson, & Davis, 2004). However, to date, there have been few studies (Davis, DiStefano, DeCuir, & Schutz, 2000; see also Brdar, Rijavec, & Loncaric, 2006; DeCuir, Ault- man, & Schutz, in press; Rice & Slaney, 2002; Sondaite & Zukauskiene, 2005; Tanaka, 2007) that have attempted to system- atically identify whether there are group differences in the ways students approach academic tasks—specifically tests—and in the strategies they deploy to attempt to manage their emotions. In his study of 100 high school and 241 college students, Zeidner (1996; see also Zeidner & Matthews, 2005) found that students with richer coping resources concurrently tended to report lower levels of trait anxiety and evidenced lower levels of state anxiety during an exam. Zeidner argued that testing situations contain the critical elements of major environmental stressors, including the need to prepare for an impending event, eminent confrontation with a stressor, uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the event, and the need to cope with the consequences. Students were asked to report their level of test anxiety, their coping resources, and their situational coping strategies 6 weeks prior to an exam. Dispositional judgments were then used to predict their level of state anxiety during an exam. Zeidner found that there was no relationship between the deployment of coping strategies and the resultant experience of anxiety during tests. In the following sections, we begin by defining what emotion regulation is and how the judgments students make about test taking may contribute to a “proneness” (Zeidner, 2007, p. 167) to experience anxiety. Next, we review four theories of emotion processes as they relate to achievement activities. Each of these theories makes specific claims about which judgments, or apprais- als, are the most salient in the study of achievement tasks. These theories describe the ways in which students’ perceptions ulti- mately affect the quality of their engagement and performance. Finally, we describe a project designed to examine the ways in which college students may approach tests in systematically dif- ferent ways—and the implications of these findings for theories of Heather A. Davis, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, North Caro- lina State University; Christine DiStefano, Department of Educational Studies, University of South Carolina–Columbia; Paul A. Schutz, Department of Ed- ucational Psychology, University of Texas–San Antonio. We acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Claire Ellen Weinstein, who included us on this project and provided guidance along the way. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Heather A. Davis, 402J Poe Hall, Box 7801, Raleigh, NC 27695-7801. E-mail: Heather_Davis@ncsu.edu Journal of Educational Psychology Copyright 2008 by the American Psychological Association 2008, Vol. 100, No. 4, 942–960 0022-0663/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0013096 942