Emotional Intelligence and test anxiety among secondary school students In EGOR locality Of EDO state, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated emotional intelligence and test anxiety among secondary school students in Egor Locality of Edo State, Nigeria with a view to guide them to overcome the usual fear syndrome associated with examinations.The study adopted a descriptive survey design.The target population consisted of 6069 (six thousand and sixty-nine) students in the 10 (ten) public Senior Secondary Schools in Egor Local Government Area of Edo State, Nigeria. A sample size of 380 (three hundred and eighty) secondary school class 2 students, were randomly selected from five randomly selected secondary schools in the study area. Two instruments, the Schutte self-report Emotional intelligence test (Schutte et al., 1998) and the Test Anxiety Questionnaire (Nist & Diehl, 1990) were adapted to collect data for the study. Mean, Standard Deviation, Pearson Product Moment Correlation and t-test were adopted to analyse the data. Findings indicated a moderate level of test anxiety among the students, though not found to be dependent on the sex of students. A non-significant negative correlation was also found to exist between emotional intelligence and test anxiety. Based on the findings, it was recommended that the government should continue to deploy professional counsellors to schools to assist in improving the usual fear syndrome associated with examinations among students. In addition, school counsellors as a routine service, should provide students with skills to improve emotional intelligence and strategies that would help to overcome test anxiety.