Abstract

Stakeholders in education are disturbed about the rate of students' attendance in secondary schools and agreed that it was one of the major factors influencing the students' academic achievement. This study tried to find out how students' attendance correlate with the academic achievement in a Federal Unity Colleges in Southwest, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling procedure was employed to collect data. Purposive sampling strategy was used to select two Co-educational Federal Unity Colleges in five States in Southwest, Nigeria (Osun, Ogun, Ekiti, Lagos and Ondo States). Intact class was used to select SS II Economics students in the
selected Sates. Three research questions were answered with instruments used in the study and Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to analysis it. Results revealed that there was negative and strong relationship between students' age and school attendance (r=-0.18 p< 0.05) in Federal Unity Colleges In addition, the result revealed that there is negative relationship between students' gender and students' class attendance (r= -0.12, p< 0.05). Furthermore the result revealed that there was strong positive relationship between achievement in Economics and students' attendance to school (r= 0.79, p<0.05). It was recommended that students' control committee should be more strengthened to reduce rate of absenteeism in the classrooms. Also, installment payment of school fees should be introduced so as to reduce students' late resumption to schools while subject teachers should give assignments to students regularly, mark and give feedback to promote students' attendance in schools.