You can do something like this
library(dplyr)
a3 %>%
mutate(across(starts_with("w"),
~ ordered(.,
levels = c(1,2,3,4,5,6),
labels = c("Strongly disagree","Moderately Disagree",
"Slightly disagree", "Slightly agree",
"Moderately Agree","Strongly agree")
)
)
)
If you need more specific help, please provide a proper REPRoducible EXample (reprex) illustrating your issue.