The epidemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been continually increasing worldwide since December 2019. Many nations throughout the world took great precautions to curb the spread of COVID-19. Unfortunately, lockdown procedures and social isolation may raise the incidence of anxiety in adolescents (Islam et al., 2021). Major public emergencies, such as natural disasters and pandemics, have a substantial impact on people's mental health (Lai et al., 2020; Rubin et al., 2009). An increase in anxiety symptoms was linked to the COVID-19 outbreak, as determined by one retrospective study done on adolescents (Hawke et al., 2020). Specifically, a prior survey in China suggested that the prevalence of anxiety symptoms reached 28.3 % during the period of COVID-19 (Ren et al., 2021).

Test anxiety, as a special type of anxiety, is a series of anxiety symptoms that appear when students concern about possible negative outcomes or failure on assessment tests (Sarason and Sarason, 1990; Zeidner, 1998). Adolescence is a period of critical transition in cognitive, psychosocial and emotional development (Hines, 2007). Moreover, in the process of education, many adolescents have faced with various evaluative exams and competitions since primary school, which may trigger test anxiety. For teenagers, test anxiety seriously threatens their learning life and leads to poor academic performance (Balogun et al., 2017; Khalaila, 2015). More seriously, the consequences of test anxiety go far beyond these and excessive test anxiety can damage their quality of life (Panda and Sharawat, 2021). Previous studies have reported that students with test anxiety suffered a great physiological and psychological burden, including fast breath, nervousness, stomach discomfort (Vitasari et al., 2010), poor sleep quality (Hamilton et al., 2021), depression (Bashir et al., 2019) and so on. Given these considerable impacts of test anxiety, it is quite significant to investigate its prevalence and risk factors.

Globally, a number of researches have been conducted on the prevalence of test anxiety among adolescents and the prevalence varied across countries. In India, it was estimated that two-thirds of school-going students had moderate to high test anxiety (Lohiya et al., 2021) while approximately 8 % (Mary et al., 2014) to 18 % (Lohiya et al., 2021) of them suffered from severe test anxiety. In England, research had showed 16.4 % of secondary school students reported severe test anxiety (Putwain and Daly, 2014). However, studies from China had reported prevalence of severe test anxiety to vary from 30 % to 40 % (Huang and Zhou, 2019; Shen et al., 2018; Zou et al., 2017). Thus, test anxiety is a common public health issue and the prevalence of test anxiety is generally thought to be on the rise (DordiNejad et al., 2011; McDonald, 2001).

The prevalence of test anxiety among adolescents in primary school has only recently been studied and the sample size was used in those studies was insufficient, especially in the era following the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the influence of some risk factors, such as childhood abuse and Internet addiction, still remains unclearly confirmed. Identifying these factors is of assistance in reducing the prevalence of test anxiety. Over the past four decades, Shenzhen has developed rapidly in social economy and invested a lot in education, which means that students in Shenzhen may have better educational resources, greater competitive pressure and more mental problems. Therefore, we carried out this study to determine the prevalence of test anxiety in Shenzhen adolescents and address factors related to test anxiety.