Perceived Influence of Flood Disruption on Academic Performance and Attendance among Senior Secondary School Students in the Orashi Region of Rivers State

The effect of flooding on students cannot be overemphasized. It is demoralizing; waking up to a flooded home disrupts one's mindset and leaves the mind unprepared for academic activities. This significantly affects students' readiness to learn. This study investigated senior secondary school students’ perceptions of the influence of flood disruption on their school attendance and academic performance in the Orashi region of Rivers State, an area identified by the Rivers State Government and the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMET) as the epicentre of flooding in the state. Guided by two research questions and two null hypotheses, the study adopted a descriptive survey design. The population comprised all senior secondary school students in public secondary schools in the four Orashi-region local government areas (Abua/Odual, Ahoada East, Ahoada West, and Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni), one school was purposively selected in each of the four Local Government Areas, and simple random sampling was used to draw a sample of 270 students (135 male and 135 female). Data were collected with a four-point Likert-scale questionnaire, the Flood Disruption and Academic Performance Questio nnaire (FDAPQ), which was validated by three experts in Measurement and Evaluation and Guidance and Counselling and yielded a Cronbach alpha coefficient of 0.83. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, while the independent samples t-test was used to test whether male and female students’ ratings differed significantly at the 0.05 level of significance. Students agreed that flooding disrupts their school attendance through inaccessible roads, displacement, loss of learning materials and unsafe school buildings (grand mean = 3.40), and they also agreed, on the whole, that it affects their academic performance. No statistically significant gender difference was detected in ratings of attendance (t(268) = 0.43, p = .670) or academic performance (t(268) = 0.76, p = .446). Because the data are self-reported perceptions from a cross-sectional survey, the findings describe perceived effect and do not establish causal or objectively measured changes in attendance or examination performance. The study recommends flood-resilient infrastructure around schools, flood-emergency and learning-continuity plans, replacement of lost learning materials, and counselling-based psychosocial support for students in flood-prone communities.

flood disruption, academic performance, school attendance, perceptions, flood-prone communities

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