Researchers are of the view that students’ attachment to social media may lead to negative consequences such as postponement of their academic work. Yet how social media use is associated with academic procrastination of students is still underexplored. This study ascertained the pathways through which social media use predicted academic procrastination of undergraduate students. The sample size comprised 500 year one students of the Faculty of Education, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. Path analysis was employed to test the model fit of the hypothetical model and show the direction of relationships between the exogenous and endogenous variables. Results showed that the hypothesized model fits the sample data satisfactorily, and Internet addiction predicted academic procrastination more than any other variable. Social media use had no significant effect on academic procrastination but indirectly significantly predicted academic procrastination through internet addiction.

Introduction.  Persistent abysmal academic achievement among adolescents in Nigerian secondary schools has become a concern among stakeholders in the Nigerian system of education. This, over time, has been linked to poor reading culture and reading skills, worsened by unproductive instructional approaches adopted by teachers for reading proficiency. An investigation into effective instructional approaches to arm adolescents with metacognitive skills for reading proficiency becomes imperative. This study, therefore, investigated the impact of cooperative learning and teacher-directed learning approaches on secondary school students’ development of metacognitive skills for reading proficiency. Method.  We adopted a quasi-experimental research design in our study. One hundred and eighteen early adolescent students were sampled from three public secondary schools in Anambra state. The instrument used in the study is an open-ended metacognitive skill for reading proficiency questionnaire (OMSRPQ). Three operations were used for the experiment: 1) task understanding, 2) strategy understanding, and 3) management of learning process. The sum of these three operations is the overall metacognitive skills of the students. Results.  Our findings showed that students in cooperative integrated reading and composition (CIRC) learning approach differed significantly from those in the teacher-directed instructional (DI) approach and the control group (C1) in task understanding operation F (2, 118) = 8.783, p <.01, strategy understanding F(2,118) = 6.324, p <.01and the overall metacognitive reading skills F(2, 118) = 7.047, p < .01. No significant mean differences occurred among the groups in management of learning process skills F (2,118) = 2.949, p >.05. Adjusted omega squared (est. ω2) test showed large to moderate effect sizes in the operations that were significant. Discussion and Conclusion.  We concluded that metacognitive skills for reading could be better enhanced in cooperative learning approach. Based on these findings, the researchers recommended that CIRC can be used in developing metacognitive skills needed in secondary school reading classrooms.

In the field of educational studies, academic engagement has become an important perspective in the domain of achievement motivation particularly in academic motivation. The study aimed to explore the students’ academic engagement as predictor of academic achievement in mathematics in Anambra State. The study adopted a multiple regression predictive design. The population of the study comprised of 21,204 SS II students from which a sample of 1500 were drawn. Multi-stage procedure was used to select the sample. Students’ Academic Engagement Questionnaire (SAEQ) was used for data collection. Students’ mathematics achievement scores from the state wide promotion examination were used to represent mathematics achievement. Cronbach’s alpha was used to determine the reliability of the items in the instruments. Reliability indices were found to be .75, for behavioural engagement, .83, for psychological engagement, .87, for cognitive engagement, .61, for emotional engagement, .84, for agentic engagement and .73 for social engagement. The overall reliability coefficient was .74 which shows that the instrument was reliable and good for the study. Four research questions and three nu ll hypotheses were formulated for the study. The standard multiple regression was used to analyze the collected data. The t-test for r, F-test and test of significance for β, were used to test hypotheses at .05 level of significance. Findings showed that social engagement is the most predictor of students’ academic achievement in Mathematics when compared with the other dimensions of academic engagement . Also, the analysis of variance indicated that the regression equation was significant in predicting academic achievement. This implies that at least one of the independent variables significantly predicted academic achievement in Mathematics... Based on these findings, it was recommended that using students’ academic engagement as a predictor of academic achievement would enable the academic institutions to identify at risk students much earlier compared to using only cumulative grade point average; which is a product of measure. This would enable academic institutions to formulate more effective intervention strategies to reduce attrition rate

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