JONAED

The study looked at possible effects regular exposure of school children to violence can have on their attitude towards schooling in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area that has had several cases of violence in recent times. In this era of no-one-left-behind educationally, there is need to find out how these vulnerable school children in the study Area are faring in the face of incessant killings around them. Causal comparative design was employed for the study. Four research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. Six schools ( 2 public and 4 private) in affected and accessible communities in the study area were purposively sampled and one hundred and eighty two students who joined those schools due to displacement from their own communities constituted the sample for the study. A 20-item attitude to schooling questionnaire with good content validity as judged by two experts; one from Measurement and Evaluation and one from Educational Psychology, University of Jos, was used for data collection. Construct validity of the instrument was established through factor analysis and its internal consistency reliability coefficient using, Chronbach-Alpha method was 0.95. Data collected were analysed using frequency counts, means and Chi-square statistics. The findings show that many of the students had positive attitude towards schooling, enrolment status of schools fluctuated, direction of attitude of students varied with gender, but not with school-type. Girls were found to have more positive attitude than boys. Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that the vulnerable students were still having positive attitude towards schooling in spite of security challenges around them. Displaced ones still enrolled into existing schools in their new localities, whether public or private. It was recommended among others that environment be made safe and secure to further boost the students’ attitude towards schooling.