The primary purpose of this research paper was to study performance anxiety among middle school students during a sight-reading audition. Furthermore, this sutdy asks whether the manner in which directions are presented by the sight-reading adjudicator during the course of an audition has significant impact on the performance outcome. Participants (n=75) were middle school students attending a highly rated band program in the Miami-Dade County (Miami, FL) area. By use of investigator-derived surveys, levels of trait and state anxiety were determined before and after the sight-reading performance. Means and standard deviations were calculated for perceived anxiety and for the resulting scores of the performance. A t-testcompared the control and experimental groups perceived level of anxiety, where statistically significant results were found at the pp