Effect of self efficacy on Students Test Anxiety; Gender based intervention

Test anxiety is performance based anxiety and has the potentials to hamper the academic development of secondary school students. It is to this effect that this study sought to examine the effect of self-efficacy technique on student’s test anxiety; Gender based intervention in Enugu Education Zone of Enugu State. The study was guided by three research questions and three hypotheses. A quasi-experimental study, which adopted the pre-test- post-test non-equivalent research design, was adopted for this study. A total of 50 identified students suffering from examination anxiety were used for the study. Stratified sampling technique was employed and used to select coeducational schools within the zone. The instrument for data collection was a 21 item instrument, titled the “Examination Anxiety Scale (EAS)”. The reliability of the instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha and a reliability coefficient of 0.86 was obtained implying that the instrument is highly reliable and yielded a consistent result. The students from the two experimental groups were subjected to a pre-test using the EAS before receiving treatment self-efficacy and peer collaborative learning. After the treatment, the EAS was reshuffled and re-administered this time as the post test. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the seven research questions generated while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the seven hypotheses. The findings of the study revealed that self-efficacy was effective in the treatment of examination anxiety. Gender was discovered not to be a significant moderating variable to examination anxiety. In light of these findings it was recommended that school counselors should adopt and use of self-efficacy technique in the treatment of test anxiety.