Identification and validation of severity standards for the academic anxiety scale

Abstract

The Academic Anxiety Scale (AAS; Cassady, 2022; Cassady et al., 2019) is a measure of the construct academic anxiety, which is a generalized representation of anxieties experienced by learners in educational settings. Academic anxiety has been identified as a preclinical indicator of anxiety that provides important predictive utility to clinical symptomologies such as anxiety and depression but also serves as a more inclusive representation than other commonly studied anxieties in academic contexts (e.g., test anxiety, reading anxiety, math anxiety). Latent Class Analyses were employed to identify severity levels for learners completing the AAS, which revealed four classes of learners characterized by levels of academic anxiety: Non-Anxious, Mild Academic Anxiety, Moderate Academic Anxiety, and High Academic Anxiety. Descriptions of the characteristics of the four classes of learners as well as the potential utility for using the AAS in a universal screening context are discussed.