ABSTRACT
The study investigated the effect of Covid 19 on the academic performance of secondary school students in public secondary schools in Egor Local Government Area. In order to attain the objectives, four research questions guided the study. The descriptive survey research design was employed for this study.The population of this study is all the 15 (fifteen) public secondary schools in Egor Local Government Areas, with a population of 3,839 Senior Secondary School III Students. The sample for the study comprised three hundred and eighty four (384) teachers representing 10% of the population of 3,839 Senior Secondary School III Students in Egor Local Government. The study adopted the simple random sampling technique to randomly select 3 schools from the 15 (fifteen) public secondary schools in Egor Local Government which is 10% of the total population of schools. Two research instruments was used for data collection. The first was a structured questionnaire titled “Effect of Covid 19 on the Academic Performance Questionnaire (PACEQ) will be used for data collection for the study. The instrument for data collection was validated by the researcher’s supervisor and two other experts in the Department of Educational Foundations, University of Benin, Benin- City. Their corrections and suggestions were incorporated into the final instrument. In order to establish the reliability of the instrument, Cronbach Alpha statistics was adopted for the study.
The instrument was administered once to twenty four (24) teachers their responses was scored and analyzed using Cronbach Alpha formula and the alpha value obtained are 0.75 for students. Therefore, the instrument for the study was reliable. The instrument was administered to the respondents with the help of a trained research assistant who helped in distributing and retrieving the instrument. It was administered and retrieved the same day.The data collected from the respondents was analyzed using simple percentage, mean (x) standard deviation (SD) and Pearson Product Moment Correlation. Simple percentage, mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions, while Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance.
The study concluded that It was revealed by the study, that the Covid 19 pandemic to a large extent resulted in the disruption of academic activities. In this sense, the government and other relevant authorities should be put measures in place that would accelerate the use of technology to foster effective interaction of teachers and students and effective coverage of the syllabus. The study recommended amongst others: The government should increase the funding of higher institutions in next year budget to allow them manage all the damages caused by the COVID-19 school close down, The government should immediately embark on the integration of all higher institutions into online education. The Nigeria government should direct all the secondary schools to extend physical teaching and research activities to the online network, conduct teaching seminars online, jointly solve new problems that may arise in the teaching process.
