Abstract

 The purpose of this study was to find out the effects of Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) on test anxiety and academic achievement of low achieving senior secondary school students in Agricultural Science in Imo State. The design ofthis study is quasi- experimental design. Three research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. A sample of 98 SSII students were selected from a population comprised of 969 SSII students from the 26 public secondary schools in Okigwe Education Zone of Imo State. 53 SSII students in an intact class made up ofthe experimental group while the control group was made up of 45 students in another intact class. The experimental group comprised of 25 test anxious low achievers while the control group comprised of 20 test anxious low achievers after final selection based on the criteria. The sampling of 45 students in both experimental and control group was determined by the number ofstudents who meet the requirement of (i) being low achievers (ii) being test anxious and (iii) being pretested and post tested using simple random sampling technique. The instrument for data collection is achievement test titled Achievement Test in Agricultural Science (ATAS) and was validated by two experts in the unit of measurement and evaluation, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. The reliability of the instrument was determined using Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient and yielded a coefficient of 0.61. All the research questions were analyzed using mean scores and standard deviation while the null hypotheses were tested using ANCOVA at 0.05 level of significance. The results of the analyzed data revealed that the students in RPT group performed better than those in the non-RPT group in Agricultural Science, so also, there was a significant difference between the mean achievement scores ofthe students in the RPT group and those in the non-RPT group in the low order cognitive Agricultural Science questions. Based on the findings it was recommended that that reciprocalpeer tutoring approach should be used forlow achiever student as it improved their academic performance.