Abstract
Educators must seek strategies to minimize test anxiety while enhancing test-taking skills to promote learning and improve academic achievement among secondary school students. This study examined test anxiety and test-taking skills as predictors of secondary school students’ academic achievement in Mathematics in Anambra State. Five research questions guided the study and five hypotheses were tested. The study adopted a corelational research design. The population consisted of 4,767 (1,729 males and 3,038 females) Senior Secondary School Two (SS2) students from all the 44 public secondary (33 Co-educational and 16 single sex) schools in Nnewi Education Zone of Anambra State in 2023/2024 academic session. A sample of 400 Senior Secondary School Students (SS2) offering Mathematics in 16 out of the 44 Government owned secondary schools in the zone was selected purposively. Test anxiety Scale (TAS) and Test Taking Skills Scale (TTSS) were used for data collection. These instruments were validated by three experts and tested for reliability. Cronbach alpha was used to establish the reliability of TAS and TTSS which yielded reliability indices of 0.86 and 0.71 respectively. Ordinary Least Square simple and multiple regressions using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26 were used to answer the research questions and test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed among others that there was a positive prediction between test anxiety and secondary school students’ poor academic achievement in Mathematics. Also, there was a low prediction of male and female students’ high academic achievement by their test anxiety in Mathematics. The study recommended among others that Mathematics teachers and school guidance counselors should make concerted efforts to reduce test anxiety and improve test-taking skills among students through proper teaching and conditioning and modeling the behaviour for better Mathematics performance.