Alongside the self-help industry, self-assessment in higher education and organizational training has blossomed, especially as digital tools have made it possible to provide immediate feedback. Both contexts lack validated tools for accomplishing their goals. This study created and validated a series of self-assessments for classroom and training use. Drawing on student self-report data, self-assessment items were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to assess construct validity and correlational analysis with existing research instruments to assess convergent validity. A set of 19 self-assessments with their accompanying validity and reliability evidence correspond to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) career-readiness (2021) skills, including communication, leadership, teamwork, technology, inclusiveness, and critical thinking.

Through the guidance of social presence theory, this study sought to understand how instructors’ affirming messages and social presence behaviors affect students’ writing apprehension in online business communication courses. The data were consistent with two models, both of which indicate that instructor affirming messages indirectly affect students’ writing apprehension in the business communication classroom. Both models also indicate that students’ burnout mediates that indirect effect. The results show how important it is for instructors to take the time to leave affirming message feedback when teaching business communication online.

This study explored potential biases in professional writing evaluation. An experiment was conducted in which individuals with hiring authority or influence at their workplace evaluated an email with multiple grammatical/typographical mistakes requesting that the reader make time to speak with the author. Participants were randomly assigned into one of five conditions, each with a separate profile photo accompanying the email. Data analysis indicates that ethnicity of the author influenced how competent the author was perceived to be and the reader’s attitude about meeting with the author.

The purpose of this study was to gauge the understanding of accessibility related to business communication material among individuals working in corporate America. Participants were asked to define accessibility, then given a definition of accessibility, and then asked to identify how to make a report and a visual accessible. A substantial number of participants were not able to define accessibility, nor identify how to make accessible changes to a report or visual. Those who could define accessibility considered accessibility goals in terms of general access to resources, usability, audience analysis, or disability-related accessibility. Business majors were less likely than other majors to be able to identify disability-related methods of making a report or visual accessible. Implications for business communication education are discussed.

In response to COVID-19, educational stakeholders are transferring traditional, face-to-face instruction to the online learning environment. The purpose of this study was to determine if business instructors’ use of immediate behaviors and clarity, which have been found to help business students overcome their writing apprehension in the face-to-face learning environment, can also be used to help business students to overcome their writing apprehension in an online learning environment. Findings indicated that instructor immediate behaviors and clarity are not interventions for writing apprehension in the online learning environment. The instructional strategies business instructors rely on in the face-to-face classroom did not have the same meaning or effect on the online classroom.

The demand for writing skills is becoming increasingly prevalent within the U.S. job market. Yet, the biggest barrier to developing successful writing skills, writing apprehension, has received very little attention from scholars in the past 30 years. The present study sought to identify the influence of instructional communicative behaviors on business students’ writing apprehension. Specifically, the study tested a model in which instructors’ immediate behaviors and clarity indirectly influenced students’ writing apprehension through the mediation of perceived immediacy. The data were consistent with the hypothesized model.

This article contains two measurement development studies on writing apprehension. Study 1 reexamines the validity of the writing apprehension measure based on the finding from prior research that a second false factor was embedded. The findings from Study 1 support the validity of a reduced measure with 6 items versus the original 20-item measure. However, this shorter measure had poor reliability. Therefore, Study 2 sought to correct the reliability issue by updating the wording of items so it was applicable to broader platforms of writing. The final measure had excellent reliability and validity statistics.