ABSTRACT

This study investigated the effect of reciprocal peer tutoring strategy on students’ academic achievement and retention in literary appreciation. The study adopted a quasi-experimental, pretest posttest non-equivalent control group research design and was carried out in Anambra state. Six research questions and six null hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study was 11,640 SS II literature students. A sample of 65 secondary school students was purposively drawn from two public co-educational secondary schools in the State. The two sampled schools were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. Data were collected using a 20-item instrument: Literature-in-English Achievement and Retention Test (LART) which was partly developed by the researcher and partly adapted from past WAEC questions and subjected to face and content validation. The validation was carried out by five lecturers, two from Curriculum and literary studies respectively and one from measurement and evaluation. The instrument was tested for reliability by trial testing on similar subjects in a secondary school in Enugu state. Scores from the trial test were analyzed using Kuder Richardson (K-R₂₁) formula so as to determine the internal consistency which yielded an index of 0.72. Before and after the treatment that lasted for six weeks, the instrument was administered on the students by their regular teachers. The data collected from the students were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions, while the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null-hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results among others showed that reciprocal peer tutoring had increasing significant effect on students’ academic achievement and retention in literary appreciation but had no significant effect on male and female students’ academic achievement and retention in literary appreciation. There were also no significant interaction effect of gender and methods on students’ academic achievement and retention in literary appreciation. The recommendations included that the Reciprocal Peer Tutoring should be introduced in secondary schools and for the government and proprietors of secondary schools to ensure regular seminars and workshops for in-service teachers on the effective ways of using the teaching strategy in classroom instructions.