Teachers Perception of Students with Dysgraphia and Academic Performance in Nigeria

Abstract

The study aims to investigate teachers’ perception of students with dysgraphia and academic performance in secondary schools in Delta State. This study adopted the descriptive survey design. The population of this study include all the teachers in 245 secondary schools in three local government area of Delta state with a population of 4,750 teachers. The three local government areas are from the three senatorial districts of Delta state which are Osadenis High School, Asaba, (Delta North), Abraka Grammar School, Abraka (Delta Central) and St. Michaels College, Oleh (Delta South). The simple random sampling technique was used to select 25 secondary schools from where 350 (152 male and 198 female) secondary school teachers were also selected. Out of the 25 secondary schools, 17 are from the rural while 8 are the urban settings. 234 teachers are from the rural and 116 from urban settings. The instrument for this study was a researcher developed four-point Likert type scale instrument. The test-retest method was used to ascertain the reliability of the instrument and it has a Cronbach Alpha reliability index of 0.875. The One-Way Anova statistics method was used to test all research hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Results revealed that dysgraphia has significant influence on the academic performance of students with the learning disorder (dysgraphia). In addition, it was found that there is significant difference in the academic performance of students with dysgraphia based on sex. Based on these findings, it was recommended that Teachers should refer students to counsellors for therapeutic attention; teachers should adopt teaching approaches that will encourage hand writing development; Such students should be allowed to use assistive technology in writing among others.