Assessment of the Effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in enhancing school attendance behaviour of truants from divorced parental background in Lagos State

Abstract

This study Assessed the Effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy in enhancing school attendance behaviour of truants from divorced parental background in Lagos State. The study adopted a 2x2 factorial matrix pretest-posttest; control group quasi-experimental design. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 90 (ninety) male and female secondary school truants from divorced parental background in Lagos State who have consistently absented from school twenty days each in first and second term school sessions without permission from six randomly selected public secondary schools in Lagos State, Nigeria. The participants were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The treatment group was exposed to eight-weeks Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy training, while participants in the control group received no training. One validated instrument: Students’ School Attendant Behaviour Questionnaire (α= 0.82), was used for data collection. Two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data were analyzed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA). There was significant main effect of treatment in the pretest/post-test school attendance behaviour scores of secondary school truants from divorced parental background in the experimental and control groups (F (2,87) = 42.583, p < .05). Also, gender has significant moderating effect on school attendance behaviour pre-post scores of truants from divorced parental background between male and female students from divorced parental background (F (2,87) = 11.95 (P < .05). Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected. The MCA result showed that the mean score for the male truant students is ( = 22.39) while that of the female is ( = 22.69). This shows that female students exhibited less truant behaviour and positively improve in attending school than male students after treatment. Therefore, School authorities should often give students orientation on the need to always seek counselling support services from their school counsellors to support their positive adjustment to teaching and learning experience in school.