MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS: Exploring it's impact on academic performance of students in public senior secondary schools in Kano state

The aim of this research is to explore the relationship between students’ mental health and their academic performances in Kano state public senior secondary schools. The study adopted descriptive survey research design where 46 schools were selected using cluster sampling technique at the initial stage where we have 23 clusters considering the 23 zonal education directorate has grouped the schools in to clusters, and then systematic random sampling technique was adopted to obtain the number of school selected. The total population of the students in the schools selected is 41,458 where the researcher used Krejcie and Morgan (1970) population and sample table to draw the sample size of the students which translated to 380 students. The instrument for data collection is a self developed close ended questionnaire designed by the researcher titled students’ mental health scale (SMHS) with YES or NO options. The data collected was analyzed using simple percentage and correlation coefficient with the aid of SPSS. The result shows that the majority of the students have moderate mental health problems, and there is a very weak positive correlation between students’ mental health and their academic performances in public senior secondary schools in Kano state.