Effects of Counseling in Curbing Persistent Lateness to School among University Secondary School Students in Rivers State, Nigeria

The non-equivalent control groups quasi-experimental design otherwise known as pretest-posttest control group quasi experimental design, investigated the effects of counseling in curbing persistent lateness to school among university secondary school students in Rivers State, in other to proffer a workable solution to one of the societal dilemmas plaguing our secondary schools.  Four research questions and four corresponding hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance.  The study population was made up of 352 persistent latecomers in the 4 university owned secondary schools.  The simple random sampling technique was used to draw 60 persistent latecomers from these schools.  The 60 students (persistent latecomers) were placed into three treatments cum one control condition of 15 subjects each.  The treatment (counseling) lasted for 5 weeks of 45 minutes each week as scheduled.  Group I (ISS RSUST) received self management technique, Group 2 (ISS Uniport) received cognitive restructuring technique while Group 3 (8 students of ISS RSUST + 7 students of ISS Uniport) received a combination of self management + cognitive restructuring techniques.  The control group was made up of 9 students from UDSS Uniport + 6 students from UOEDSS Ndele.  The control group members were accorded no treatment.  Questionnaire for persistent latecomers was used to collect data from the subjects.  The reliability of QPLC was established using the Pearson product moment correlation coefficient to analyze the scores obtained in the test-retest reliability measure used and it yielded a coefficient of “r” 0.79 which was accepted to be strong.  Data was analyzed using the independent t-test for the first 3 hypotheses and ANOVA for the 4^th Hypothesis.  Results showed positive significant effects of counseling in curbing persistent lateness to school among the 3 experimental groups that received counseling.  Punctual school attendance significantly improved better among the 3 experimental groups than those in the controls group.  Finally there was no statistical significant mean difference between the 3 experimental groups, no group was found to be more effective than the other.  It was recommended among others that counselors, para-counselors, teachers and those in the helping profession be trained to use group counseling based on cognitive approaches to counseling to improve punctual and regular school attendance among secondary schools student.