Street Hawking and Truancy as Predictor of Academic Performance Amongst Secondary School Students in Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

The paper examined street hawking as predictor of truancy among secondary school students in Ondo State, Nigeria. The population of the study comprised all the secondary school teachers. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 200 teachers. The instrument for data collection was self-constructed questionnaire titled “Street Hawking and Truancy” on four-point Likert scale. Pearson product movement correlation was used to determine the correlation coefficient which was 0.76. Three hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The hypotheses were tested using analysis. The result indicated that there was a significant relationship between street hawking and truancy amongst secondary school students. The result also showed that there was a significant relationship between street hawking and academic performance of secondary school students, and finally the result revealed that there was a significant relationship between street hawking and academic performance of secondary school students. The study concluded that there was a positive relationship between street hawking, truancy and academic performance due to so many factors such as inability to pay school fee, unauthorized extra fees being charged by school authorities, poor socio-economic status of the students. The study recommended amongst others that the state’s constituted law enforcement agents should further intensify efforts towards apprehending any student found roaming about the streets during official school hours.