The Causal Influence of Anxiety on Academic Achievement for Students of Differing Intellectural Ability

The present study examined the relationship be-tween anxiety and learning within the context of drive theory and trait-state anxiety theory. It was hypothesized that trait anxiety (A-trait) would in-fluence state anxiety (A-state), which in turn would influence academic achievement. The subjects were 86 students enrolled in a graduate education course for whom measures of A-state, A-trait, and achieve-ment were obtained concurrently at three times during the course. GRE scores were used as mea-sures of intellectual ability. Data were analyzed using the frequency-of-change-in-product-moment technique (Yee & Gage, 1968), a causal analysis statistic which permits the determination of source and direction of causal influence in lagged correla-tional data. Results showed that A-trait influenced A-state and achievement, but the relationship be-tween A-state and achievement was ambiguous. When intellectual ability was considered, A-trait was found to influence A-state and achievement, but only for high-ability students. The relationship between anxiety and learn-ing has been a topic of intense interest for psy-chologists and educators over the past quarter century. Much of the early research in this field tested hypotheses derived from drive theory (Taylor, 1956; Spence, 1958), which specifies that anxiety has a causal influence on perform-ance