Examination Anxiety and Shyness among Secondary School Students in Kwara State, Nigeria

Abstract

Shyness and examination anxiety are behavioural realities among students in this generation and because of its adverse effect in Nigeria educational system, it needs cogent and urgent intervention. This study investigates examination anxiety and shyness among students in secondary schools in Kwara State. Multistage sampling technique is used for selecting 600 secondary school students. At stage one, two hundred students were randomly selected from each of the three senatorial districts in Kwara State: Kwara south, Kwara central and Kwara North. At stage two, the researchers stratified the respondents into different state based on variable of gender and class. In stage three, the researchers employed simple random sampling technique to select 600 secondary school students consisting of 330 males and 270 females. The questionnaire used is entitled “Examination Anxiety and Shyness Questionnaire (EASQ). T-test statistics is used to test the hypotheses. Findings show that the hypotheses 1 and 3 were significant and hypotheses 2 and 4 were not significant. The level of significance is set at 0.05 and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for hypotheses 3,4,5 and 6. Generally, the results show that majority of the respondents are examination-anxious and are shy. Implication of the findings is that shyness and examination anxiety are behavioural realities among students. Hence, the school counsellors should pay special attention to these students behavioural realities (shyness and examination anxiety).