SCHOOL CLIMATEAS CORRELATE STUDENT’S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

This study was carried out to investigate the school climate as a correlate of students’ academic performance. To guide the study, seven research questions were raised, out of which six were hypothesized and tested at 0.05 level of significance.
The descriptive survey research design was adopted in this study. The population of this study was made up of 13,051 public senior secondary school students. The sample size of 300 was selected using the multi-stage sampling procedure (i.e. involving purposive and simple random sampling). The purposive sampling technique was used to select ten (10) public secondary schools in the locality, as the entire public secondary schools were too large for the study. The simple random sampling technique was used to choose the sample from the available population. A total of ten public secondary schools was selected at random with 30 students representing each school, the technique is relevant because there will be a chance of equal selection and representation of the schools involved; these constituted the sample size of the study. A research instrument was used, titled: “School Climate as a Correlate of Students Academic Performance Questionnaire” (SCSAPQ). The instrument was validated by the researcher’s supervisor and two other experts in the Department of Educational Management. The cronbach alpha statistics was used to establish the reliability of the instrument and the r-value of 0.76 was obtained. Data were analysed using descriptives (frequency counts, percentages, means, standard deviation) and inferential statistics (Pearson correlation, Analysis of Co-variance (ANCOVA), and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)).
The findings revealed that school climate does not negatively affect students academic performance; as it can be said they had a good/fairly good performance; there was no significant relationship between school climate and students academic performance in Oredo LGA; there was no significant difference between school climate and students academic performance based on age; there was no significant difference between school climate and students academic performance based on sex; there was no significant difference between school climate and students academic performance based on location; there was no significant difference between school climate and students academic performance based on school type; and there was no significant difference between school climate and students academic performance based on class size. It was concluded that school climate does not negatively affect students academic performance as no significant relationship existed between the two variables as well as other intervening variables as age, sex, location, school type and class size. It was chiefly recommended that in promoting students performance, reliance should not solely be on the school climate, but other factors should be considered such as students’ motivational beliefs and
interest.