Apprehension about Writing: Further Results

Abstract

During the second half of the spring semester of 1997, the authors administered Riffe and Stacks's 1992 questionnaire in Advanced Composition classes to 149 students who were at least second semester sophomores. Of those, 37 had taken the questionnaire as entering freshmen as part of a larger study. Because apprehension changes, especially during college, and one of the English Department's goals is to make students less apprehensive about writing, the authors expected to find significant differences in the scale scores in the direction of less apprehension. But when the mean scale scores of the first and second administrations were compared, four of the scale scores increased in the direction of less apprehension, while one indicated more apprehension.