Communication Apprehension and Grades: Why Students Who Fear Speaking Earn Less, and Where They Don’t

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR McCroskey and Andersen measured how anxious college students were about speaking and set it against their academic records. The most apprehensive students had lower entrance-test scores and lower grades. In a lecture course where nobody talked to the lecturer, the difference disappeared, and the most apprehensive students were the only ones who preferred it that way.

• Paper: McCroskey, J. C., & Andersen, J. F. (1976). The relationship between communication apprehension and academic achievement among college students. Human Communication Research, 3(1), 73–81.
• Setting: Students in basic communication courses at West Virginia University, 1974 to 1976.
• Measure: The Personal Report of Communication Apprehension (PRCA), a questionnaire on anxiety about speaking. Its reliability in these samples was .93 to .95.
• Design: Four correlational studies. Students were grouped by apprehension: high or low beyond one standard deviation from the mean, extreme beyond one and a half.
• Outcomes: ACT entrance-test scores, grade point average, exam scores in a mass-lecture course, and attitudes to lecture and small classes.
• Access: Subscription-only at the journal. The first author posted a scan on his own publications website, which is what this summary is read from.

Some students never raise their hand. James McCroskey, who spent his career studying the fear of speaking, and Janis Andersen, both at West Virginia University, asked whether that silence costs those students anything in their results, and whether the cost depends on the kind of class.1

Why silence might cost grades

In a traditional class, students learn partly by talking. They ask questions to clear up what they missed, they let the teacher know whether an explanation landed, and in some courses they are graded directly on participation. McCroskey had estimated that at least 15 to 20 per cent of students suffer from debilitating apprehension about speaking. If that fear stops them doing any of those things, they should learn less and be marked lower.

The argument has a sharp edge: it predicts where the cost should appear and where it should not. In a mass lecture where nobody talks to the lecturer, an anxious student gives up nothing that anyone else is getting. So the authors made three predictions:

• In interactive teaching, highly apprehensive students would achieve less than students with little apprehension.
• In a lecture system that shuts out interaction, they would achieve no less.
• Asked which they preferred, highly apprehensive students would favour the lecture hall and everyone else the small class.

The four studies

Grades and test scores

Both measures of achievement in ordinary schooling came out as predicted. On the ACT, the differences between apprehension groups were significant for the composite score and for all four subscores. They were largest for the composite and for social science, and smallest for mathematics, which the authors read as support for their explanation: high school social science is usually taught through discussion, mathematics much less so.

Grade point averages followed the same pattern, step by step down the scale of apprehension.

Where the difference disappeared

The third study is what makes the paper more than a correlation between anxiety and grades. It took place in a course built to shut out interaction: all its content came through mass lectures of several hundred students, with no textbook and no discussion sessions. Questions were not allowed during lectures, contact with the instructor was discouraged, and fewer than 1 per cent of students ever spoke to the instructor about the material. Achievement was the combined score on four multiple-choice exams, 100 questions in all.

There, apprehension made no difference. The extremely apprehensive students in fact had the highest average of any group, though not significantly.

Mean scores by apprehension group, in interactive schooling and in the lecture course

A study that predicts no difference has a problem: failing to find one proves little if the study was too small to find it. So the authors checked how likely they were to have missed a real effect.

An effect of that size would explain about one per cent of the variation in exam scores. The authors concluded that any link between apprehension and achievement in a lecture course was, at most, too small to matter.

Set side by side, the paper’s own effect sizes show the contrast.

Which class they would choose

The last study asked 775 students, each taking both a lecture course of 350 to 400 and a discussion course capped at 25, how far they agreed with two statements: that they preferred lecture courses to any other kind, and that they liked small classes with a good deal of discussion. The statements were hidden among 75 attitude items so the purpose would not be obvious.

The authors drew a practical conclusion that still reads as unusual. No one teaching system suits every student, they argued: a course that relies on students choosing to speak up puts its most anxious students at a competitive disadvantage, while the much-criticised mass lecture does not. Ideally, the system would be matched to the student.

Has it held up?

The direction has. A meta-analysis of 30 studies found higher apprehension consistently, if weakly, linked to lower scores on measures of cognitive performance.2 Its authors later summarised the average correlation as small, about .10 in size, but consistent.3 That is a better guide to the size of the effect than this paper’s extreme-group comparisons.

McCroskey’s group also went on to follow 1,884 new students through four years at the same university, and found the most apprehensive more likely to leave and, in their first two years, earning lower grades.4 That study has its own article in this series.

What this study cannot tell you

• It shows a link, not a cause. The ACT was taken in the last year of high school, before these students’ apprehension was measured, and apprehension goes with several personality traits that also predict grades. The authors argue that apprehension is the cause; the design cannot show it.
• Extreme groups make effects look bigger. The 21 per cent comes from the few students at each end of the scale. Across all high and low apprehensives it was 2 to 4 per cent, and later research puts the average correlation at about .10.
• The lecture comparison is one course, with its own kind of exam, so the missing difference may partly reflect that course rather than only the absence of talk.
• The attitude results rest on two single statements, whose combined reliability the authors estimate at .66, and the sample size in the text and in the table disagree.
• One university in the mid-1970s, with records anonymised so that sex and year of study could not be taken into account.

What a speaker can take from it

The cost of fearing to speak is rarely one bad moment. It is the question not asked and the discussion sat out, repeated for years, and in this study it showed up in grades. Where speaking was never required, the anxious students lost nothing, and they chose those rooms when they could.

That choice protects in the short run and costs in the long run, because most of what matters, at school and after it, happens in rooms where people are expected to speak. The fear this study measured is one that research has since learned to reduce: as the meta-analysts above sum up the treatment trials, each of the common treatments lowers it.3 The useful response is not to find rooms where you will never have to talk, but to practise in rooms where talking is safe, until the rooms where it counts stop costing you.

This article summarises a published paper, read from the scan its first author posted. Every mean, effect size, attitude score and power figure is the authors’ own, from Tables 1 and 2 and the text. The formulas behind the power analysis are Cohen’s, applied to the values the paper reports.

Measured

• Anxiety about speaking, by questionnaire
• ACT scores and grade point averages, from university records
• Scores on four exams in a mass-lecture course
• Agreement with two statements about lecture and discussion classes

Inferred, not measured

• That apprehension lowers achievement: the studies are correlational, and the ACT was taken before apprehension was measured
• That the lack of talk is what removed the difference in the lecture course: one course, with a different kind of exam

References

1. McCroskey, J. C., & Andersen, J. F. (1976). The relationship between communication apprehension and academic achievement among college students. Human Communication Research, 3(1), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1976.tb00506.x
2. Bourhis, J., & Allen, M. (1992). Meta-analysis of the relationship between communication apprehension and cognitive performance. Communication Education, 41(1), 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529209378871
3. Allen, M., & Bourhis, J. (1995). The relationship of communication apprehension to communication behavior: a meta-analysis. Paper presented at the Western States Communication Association, Portland, OR (ERIC ED379706). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED379706
4. McCroskey, J. C., Booth-Butterfield, S., & Payne, S. K. (1989). The impact of communication apprehension on college student retention and success. Communication Quarterly, 37(2), 100–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463378909385531