AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SHAPING AND FLOODING TECHNIQUES IN REDUCING EXAMINATION PHOBIA AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS
The paper examined the effect of two therapies (shaping and flooding therapies) on examination phobia among students and the consequence on their academic achievement. The research adopted the pretest, post-test and control group quasi-experimental design. Three groups were involved in the study. The first group was exposed to the shaping therapy. The second group was handled with the Flooding therapy as a technique while the third group was the control group left as the waiting list group. The population for this study consisted of both public and private secondary school students in Ogun State. The sample consisted of two hundred secondary school students in both private and public schools selected through simple random sampling technique. Two secondary schools were randomly picked from each bloc (public and private schools). Fifty participants were selected from each of the schools, which made a total of two hundred at the end. The sample consisted of 100 male and 100 female students in both public and private senior secondary schools. The study targeted senior secondary school students (S.S.1- S.S.3) as participants. The instrument used for the study was the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scales (SCAC) (1994) and (2003). The data obtained was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The formulated hypotheses were statistically analyzed using Analysis of Covariance and a post Hoc test using the Tukey HSD was also adopted to find out the direction of difference. All the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance.