BUILDING VENTILATION, LIGHTING AND STUDENTS ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN KEBBI STATE SECONDARY SCHOOLS, NIGERIA

Abstract

Poor school plant construction in Nigerian secondary schools has become a national malaise at a time when the global focus is on providing conducive a child-friendly learning environments. This undesirable phenomenon has resulted in designing and constructing buildings that have inadequate provision for ventilation and lighting, which are critical for comfort and concentration on learning tasks. This study focuses attention on how ventilation and lighting of school buildings relate to student academic performance in Kebbi State secondary schools. Stratified random sampling technique was sued to select 26 of such schools, while simple random sampling was used to select 500 teachers as participants. Examination results format, observation inventory and questionnaire were used to generate data for the study. Two hypotheses were formulated and tested using Pearson correlation analysis. The study revealed that ventilation and lighting in Kebbi State secondary schools was 60% below the required standards and that student academic performance was poor with a mean performance rate of 22% in the six years studied. It was found that both ventilation and lighting were significantly, positively and highly correlated with student academic performance having Pearson calculated value of .98. It was recommended among others, that school plant construction should strictly be in line with educational specifications, such that adequate provision is made for ventilation and lighting of school buildings as a strategy for enhancing student academic performance in Kebbi State secondary schools.