A review of research on the negative effects of text anxiety on scholastic performance led to the consideration of the use of matching formats for anxiety reduction. Three experiments were conducted in which high school juniors and seniors took parallel matching and multiple-choice tests covering topics of prior knowledge (Exp. I) or recently learned information (Experiments II and III). Results showed that matching-tests were superior to multiple-choice formats: Students overwhelmingly preferred the matching-test formats, scored equally high or significantly better on them, and experienced significantly less debilitating test anxiety. The conclusion is that traditional dependence on multiple-choice tests to the avoidance of matching items is questionable.
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