OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF ADULT LEARNERS IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN RIVERS STATE

Abstract

The study investigated occupational health and academic performance of adult learners in secondary schools in 
Rivers State. Four research questions were raised and four hypotheses tested in the study. Correlation design was 
adopted in the study as it focused on investigating relationship between dependent and independent variables. 
Population of the study was all public senior secondary school students who were above 25 years while 
convenience sampling technique was used to select 126 students who formed the sample size of the study. 
Instrument used for data collection were questionnaire which consisted of a 15 item questionnaire used for 
collecting data on the independent variable of the study tagged “Occupational Health Questionnaire” (OHQ) 
and a 10-item questionnaire was also used for data collection on the dependent variable of the study and titled 
“Academic Performance Questionnaire” (APQ), both responded to on a four point modified Likert scale of 
Strongly Agree (SA=4), Agree (A=3), Disagree (D=2) and Strongly Disagree (SD=1). The instruments were face 
and content validated by three Measurement and Evaluation experts at the University of Port Harcourt while 
Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the reliability of the questionnaires and yielded an index of 0.79 for OHQ 
while that of APQ was 0.82. The research questions were answered using simple regression for research questions 
one to three and multiple regression for research question four while hypotheses one to three were tested using ttest associated with simple regression and hypothesis four was tested using One-Way Analysis of Variance both 
at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that mental health had the greatest effect on the 
academic performance of adult learners in the schools and this was followed by their social and physical health 
which all had significant effect. It was revealed that the combined occupational health had a 97.5% effect on the 
academic performance of the adult learners. The study recommended regular counselling for these learners to 
sustain their mental health and improve their academic performance in school