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Validating the Academic Anxiety Inventory with a Bilingual d/Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing Sample
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Rachel Pizzie1, Christina Kim1, Rachel Sortino1, Rachel Inghram1; 1Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., USA
Academic anxiety refers to feelings of anxiety and negativity associated with specific domains of academic skills or knowledge, such as math anxiety, science anxiety, or writing anxiety. Not only does academic anxiety relate to negative experiences, but it also detracts from the performance of academic skills, resulting in poorer outcomes and reduced academic achievement. In the present study, we explored the psychometric properties of the Academic Anxiety Inventory (AAI), a questionnaire designed to assess math, science, writing, test, and trait (general) anxiety. In particular, we sought to validate this questionnaire with a sample of d/Deaf, DeafBlind, and hard of hearing (DDBHH) participants (N = 145). DDBHH individuals may face additional challenges and barriers to academic achievement created by lack of accessibility, which may put DDBHH individuals at greater risk for developing anxiety around different domains of knowledge. Many DDBHH people in the US are bilingual, gaining proficiency in both English and American Sign Language (ASL). Our research evaluates the reliability and validity of utilizing the AAI in DDBHH participants, presenting the original written English version of the AAI with accompanying videos of each item in ASL signed by a native deaf signer, making the AAI more accessible and friendly to bilingual DDBHH participants. The results of this study suggest that the AAI is a reliable and valid measure of academic anxiety among DDBHH communities. We investigated each subscale of the AAI and found that all five subscales had sufficient reliability using Cronbach’s alpha. Using factor analysis and principal components analysis we also evaluated whether the fifty items in the AAI were represented by the hypothesized five subscales for math anxiety, science anxiety, writing anxiety, test anxiety, and trait (general) anxiety. We found that the vast majority of questionnaire items loaded onto factors representing each hypothesized domain of anxiety, and that this factor structure was extremely similar to the original results reported with a hearing sample of participants (N = 236). We also show that each AAI subscale has a relatively low degree of intercorrelation with the other domains, indicating that these ten-item subscales measure independent domains of anxiety. In a subset of DDBHH participants, we also evaluated the test-retest reliability of all five domains. Our results show high test-retest reliability across all subscales. We collected additional information about participants’ language backgrounds, giving us insight into how bilingual experiences in ASL and English were related to anxiety about writing skills in English. Our results showed that self-reported language preferences were also significantly associated with our measure of writing anxiety. An increased preference for communicating in written English was associated with decreased writing anxiety in DDBHH participants. Interestingly, increased self-reported comfort with ASL was also associated with decreased writing anxiety. These results suggest that building stronger bilingual language skills in DDBHH people was associated with decreased writing anxiety. Taken together, these results suggest that the AAI is a reliable and valid measure of academic anxiety in DDBHH individuals, and extends our knowledge about academic anxiety and bilingualism.
Topic Areas: Signed Language and Gesture, Multilingualism