Development and Preliminary Validation of a Reading Anxiety Inventory for Children and Adolescents

Purpose: Anxiety can detrimentally influence academic performance. There are a number of subject-specific anxiety measures for mathematics, science, foreign language, and other subjects. Although the act of reading can elicit anxiety in both poor and adequate readers, there are currently no modern, brief, and validated measures of reading anxiety. Potentially because of these measurement limitations, the study of reading anxiety has lagged behind that of other academic subjects. This preliminary study presents a measure of reading anxiety that is quick and accessible to students with reading difficulties. Method: We describe the scale construction and adaptation procedures including the item generation phase, scale development phase, and pilot testing phase. Results: We demonstrate that the 11-item Reading Anxiety Inventory shows preliminary internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent validity with a measure of test anxiety in a sample of 8-18 year old students (N=51). Conclusion: Future research is needed to replicate these findings and establish predictive and divergent validity with other measures. Results suggest that this measure can be used by other researchers to further establish psychometric properties, which is a necessary next step in advancing the study of reading anxiety.