THE PSYCHOSOCIAL EFFECTS OF COVID 19 PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT

The study is to examine the psychosocial effects of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on students’ academic performance of secondary schools’ students in selected schools in Egor Local Government Area of Benin-City, Edo State. The data were collected from four public secondary schools in Benin-City, Edo state, Nigeria. Due to the finite nature of the study's population, a non-probability sampling technique was adopted. and the Chi-square test was used to test all the hypotheses of the study. The study validated the null hypothesis that the Covid-19 Pandemic lockdown has no significant effect on the teacher-student interaction in the selected secondary schools. While refuting the null hypothesis that the Covid-19 Pandemic lockdown has no significant effect on the students’ psychosocial status in the selected secondary schools. Similarly, we reject the null hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has not significantly affected students’ academic performance in the selected secondary schools. We thus recommend that the government should increase the funding of secondary schools in next year's budget to allow them to manage all the damages caused by the COVID-19 school close down. Also, the government should immediately embark on the integration of all secondary schools into online education and governments at all levels should direct all the secondary schools to extend physical teaching, conduct online teaching and jointly solve new problems that may arise in the teaching process.