STUDENTS’ ATTITUDINAL CHARACTERISTIC AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN DISTANCE LEARNING PROGRAMME AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN, IBADAN.

Abstract

The emergence and acceptance of distance education as an alternative higher educational delivery has made it imperative to ensure the success of students in the programme for it to remain relevant in the educational system. This is contingent on the fact that the standard of the programme can be judged by students’ academic performance.  Attitude has been seen as very critical to the attainment of individual’s endeavour. This study therefore explored the predictive power of students’ attitudinal characteristic on academic performance.  It provided a causal explanation to distance learners’ academic performance through the analysis of students’ attitudes towards distance learning at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.  The study adopted the descriptive research design of ‘ex-post facto’ type.  Simple random sampling technique was used to select 1500 participants while purposive sampling technique was adopted to select the University of Ibadan’s Distance Learning Centre. Data were collected through questionnaire during the 2009 contact session. Two research questions and hypotheses each were answered and tested in the study.  Pearson correlation, regression analysis and T-test were employed for data analysis. Students’ attitude towards distance learning has significant contributions to academic performance. On students’ attitudes towards distance learning, gender made significant difference while age did not. Students should always display positive attitudinal dispositions towards distance learning.