Mediating Role of Perfectionism between Thought Control Strategies and Test Anxiety

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between thought control strategies and test anxiety: the mediating role of perfectionism among male and female students of high schools for the gifted in the first and second districts of Kerman in 2017. It was a descriptive and correlational study. The statistical population of the study included female and male students of high schools for the gifted in the first and second districts of Kerman in the age range of 12 to 18 years old with a total sample size of 2400 subjects. Considering the population size and the sample size, a total number of 331 subjects were selected according to Morgan's table. Participants were selected randomly in a multi-stage cluster sampling and pun within each cluster by a simple random method. The research tools were the Thought Control Questionnaire of Wells and Matthews (1994), the Test Anxiety questionnaire of Sarason (1957) and Frost et al. (1990) questionnaire on perfectionism. Research results using Pearson's correlation coefficient and the indirect effect (mediator variable) using bootstrap method in Preacher and Hayes’ Macro SPSS program (2004) showed that thought control had a significant effect on perfectionism and perfectionism had a significant effect on test anxiety. However, thought control strategies did not have a significant effect on test anxiety.