STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ON SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ENUGU STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study was carried out to investigate Students’ perception on School Environment and Academic Performance in Secondary Schools in Enugu State. Descriptive research design was adopted to the study. The population for the study was 16, 397 SSII students (male students 6,959 and 9,438 female students) respondents in the 298 secondary schools in Enugu State education zone while the sample of the study was 391 respondents which comprised 191 male students and 200 female students using Taro Yamen formula (2000). The researcher employed multi-stage sampling techniques for the study. A purposive random sampling technique was used to draw the sample from the population. Three experts validated the instrument, two from Educational Management while the third was from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Education specializing in Measurement and Evaluation, all from Enugu state university of science and technology (ESUT) Enugu. To ensure the instrument's reliability, a preliminary test was conducted involving 40 respondents, consisting of 14 principals and 26 students from secondary schools in Ebonyi State. The choice of Ebonyi State was made because of the similar organizational process of secondary schools between both states. Also, they use the same educational policy. The researcher used Cronbach Alpha method to determine the internal consistency of the instrument which yielded .81 for cluster 1, .83 for cluster 2, .80 for cluster 3, .78 for cluster 4 and .81 for cluster 5. The overall reliability index was .80. This showed that the instrument was suitable for this study Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study; while student t-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significant. Cluster 1 has 13 items on school location, cluster 2 has 12 items on traditional school environment, The instrument was structured in a 4-point response categories and rating values as follows; Very High Extent (VHE) – 4 points, High Extent (HE) – 3 points, Low Extent (LE) – 2 points and Very Low Extent (VLE) – 1 point. The findings of the study showed that students have positive perception on the effect of school location and traditional school environment on academic performance of students in public secondary schools in Enugu State