EFFECT OF SELF-MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUE ON LATE COMING AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOLS STUDENTS IN AWKA SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, NIGERIA

Quality in education can be seen as fitness for purpose and one indicator of this is the Lateness to school is a behavioural problem that constitutes a serious academic impediment to both the students and the teachers in schools. This study, therefore, investigated the effect of the Self-management technique on late coming among secondary schools students in Awka South Local Government Area. One research question and one null hypothesis guided the study. Quasi-experimental research was adopted in carrying out the study. A sample size of 109 adolescents was chosen from a population of 355 students with records of habitual lateness to school. The sample was derived from three schools selected using the purposive sampling technique based on the schools that recorded a higher number of students that are chronic late-comers. The instrument, Observation Guide was used for data collection. Data relating to research questions were arranged in tabular form and used in answering the research questions while data relating to hypotheses were analysed using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). Findings from the study revealed that the Self-management technique was effective in modifying lateness behaviour and reducing the magnitude of lateness among secondary school students. The findings further revealed that the effect of the selfmanagement technique in modifying lateness behaviour and reducing the magnitude of lateness among secondary school students was significant. Based on the findings, recommendations were made that the self-management technique is an effective technique for modifying students’ lateness behaviour for practicing counsellors. Therefore, practicing counsellors should adopt the use of these techniques in counselling secondary school students to avert lateness behaviour.


Introduction
Formal education which is synonymous with schooling is an indispensable aspect of national development, hence the continued expansion of the huge investment in the formal school system. In spite of this investment in formal education in Nigeria, researches such as Nakpodia and Dafiaghor (2011) have revealed that late coming to school constitutes one of the major and continuous problems facing school administrators, teachers and parents.
Late-coming to school is the inability of students to be punctual at school within the stipulated days and time. Lateness to school has been an age-long problem and has been a problem of concern to many, including the school management, teachers, parents, and guidance counsellors. This is because lateness to school prevents the late-coming student from full participation in school programmes and lessons. Late coming to school if left unchecked especially at the secondary school level, will likely thwart the goals of secondary education as stipulated in section 5, No.22 (e) of National Policy on Education of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (2013), which states that secondary education shall "inspire students with a desire for self-improvement and achievement of excellence". Lateness to school could portend a hindrance to the actualization of this specific objective.
Moreover, the assertion, that success of the school in carrying out its primary charge of educating and socializing students is dependent on students' punctuality to school has been noted by Chujor and Kennedy (2014). This is to say that to benefit from the academic programme in its entirety; students need to be present in the school at the start of each school day. This is an important factor in success as observed by Rothmas (2001).
The term late means arriving, happening or done after the expected, arranged or usual time (Hornby, 2006). It is also defined as coming after the usual or proper time. A further definition of the term is happening or arriving after the planned, expected, usual or necessary time (Gillard, 2003). In the context of this study, therefore, late coming refers to students' habitual absence from school after the official stipulated time of onset of school activities. This would mean not being punctual or early on time for school activities. In measuring with what is practiced in most secondary schools in Awka education zone, late coming to school in this starts by 7.35 am.
Late coming has been an age-long problem and a matter of great concern, especially in secondary schools as it disrupts the school's primary goal which is geared towards self-improvement and achievement of excellence. Chujor and Kennedy (2014) have shown that there is a direct correlation between punctuality and students' achievements. This is perhaps the reason measures are taken by the school management to curb the occurrence of excessive late-coming to school. Although such adopted measures as students being subjected to kneeling, caned or given other corporal punishments such as toilet washing, sweeping, weeding and a lot more has been in place, yet it does not seem to have shown any measurable improvement in students' time of arriving at school.
The time of students' late arrival to school as researchers such as Breeze, Woosh, Batt and Fine (2010), Egbule (2004) and Oghuvw (2008) noted could be caused by some usual habits as going late to bed, waking up late, watching late night movies, waiting for friends, family and cultural backgrounds, engagement in untimely domestic activities, among other reasons. More so, it has been observed that lateness to school has a gender dimension. According to Emore (2005), lateness to school is more common among female students than their male counterparts. This is because as Emore noted, their involvement in the domestic activities given to them by their parents contributes to their arriving late to school.
Arriving late to school goes against all ethics of punctuality which is related to productivity, discipline and behaviour. Thus, reducing students' late coming would mean building the culture of punctuality in the adolescents which will be later used in their workplaces. The problem created by lateness to school is therefore enormous. Latecomers to school miss morning assemblies, instructions and announcements; hence they may act against school regulations unintentionally. The most crucial learning hours of a school day are the morning hours because it is the period when students are most attentive. Students who are late miss the beginning of their morning classes and they also cause disturbance when they arrive late to class, distracting both the teachers and the students in the class. As Caldarella, Christensen, Young and Densley (2011) noted, students who are frequently late normally have lower grade point average (GPA), lower scores on standardized assessments, and lower graduation rates. Therefore, chronic lateness to school could be linked to later failures in schools as late coming could lead to students feeling disconnected from their schools, leading to behavioural problems that may lead to dropping out.
Moreover, the habit of lateness to school will likely spread to other activities of the individual involved, such as going to church and working late, thereby not developing a good personality. Students who are frequently late to school are also more apt to be fired from a job for showing up late. When students are late, they negatively impact their teachers and other students. Teachers can become frustrated as latecomers consistently disrupt their teaching, often requiring re-teaching of what they have missed. Late coming could negatively affect the overall classroom environment.
Many scholars today are perturbed by the extent to which lateness has affected and continued to affect learning environments in school. Moved by the realisation that corporal punishment does not seem to have a lasting effect on the students, scholars have suggested the use of psychological techniques in modifying students who consistently arrive late to school. One such technique includes the technique of self-management.
According to Adams, Greiner and Corrigan (2004), self-management (SM) is defined as the process that involves the tasks that individuals must undertake in order to live well with one or more chronic conditions. Self-management is also defined as a motivational intervention in which the individual actively participates in designing and carrying out the modification programme (Aderanti & Hassan, 2012). It is, therefore, a counselling technique in which the client is schooled in a number of techniques that enable clients to take control of their activities and acquire self-regulatory capacity. It implies a joint formulation of goals by both counsellor and client. The self-management technique seems appropriate in the context of reducing lateness because of its tendency to help the students to make a definite decision on coping with studentship with the aim of achieving desirable results in future. It will assist them in breaking away from lateness habits.

Statement of the Problem
Lateness to school could easily lead to habitual lateness to duty now and in future. The habitual late to school students quickly mix up with rough children in schools. The students who are frequently late to school have higher rates of suspension and other disciplinary measures. Lateness to school, therefore, leads to other behavioural problems in schools such as truancy and the joining of bad gangs. Lateness to school if allowed to persist and unchecked, could lead to the nation being plunged into a difficult situation.
Although several researchers had established the efficacy of self-management (example, Gresham 2004;& Olanrewaju & Olufunmilayo, 2014). Studies such as Chujor and Kennedy (2014); Nakpodia and Dafiaghor (2011) have been also carried out to reduce the occurrence of late coming in the Nigerian school system. However, not many efforts have been made to investigate the effect of self-management on the reduction of lateness to school in Anambra state. Thus, the present study sought to bridge the identified gap in the literature and investigated the effect of self-management techniques on the reduction of students' lateness to school.

Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of Self-management techniques on late-coming among secondary schools students. Specifically, the study sought to determine: • The effect of self-management technique on students' lateness when compared with those who received conventional counselling using their pre-treatment and post-treatment times of lateness to school.

Research Questions
The following research questions guided the study: • What is the effect of self-management technique on students' lateness when compared with those who received conventional counselling using their pretreatment and post-treatment times of lateness to school?

Hypotheses
The following null hypothesis was formulated to guide the study and was tested at the 0.05 level of significance: • The effect of self-management technique on students' lateness to school is not significant using the pre-treatment and post-treatment times of lateness of students treated with the technique and those treated with conventional counselling.

Research Design
This study is a non-randomized pre-test, post-test, control group quasi-experimental research. The study involved two treatment conditions (Experimental and Control group), each comprising of students that were identified as chronic latecomers to school.

Research Setting
The study was conducted in Awka Education Zone of Anambra State, Nigeria. The area was chosen for the study based on observation by the researcher having a high record of students arriving late to school irrespective of the punishment often meted out to them.

Participants
The sample of the study comprised 109 students. The population comprised all the students identified as always coming to the school late. The selection was based on the level of their times of coming late to school.

Instrument for Data Collection
The instrument for data collection in this study is termed "Observational Guide" (OG). This is an instrument that was developed by Nwankwo (2010). The instrument is made up of items in a checklist which consists of the names of late-coming students in a class, the sex, the arrival time and the days of the week. The instrument assesses the frequency of students' late-coming behaviour before, during and after treatment. The instrument has a four-point option measuring the degree of students' lateness based on the time of the students' arrival at school.

Experimental Procedure
The researcher obtained the approval of the schools' management for carrying on with the research through a consent letter that was given to the management. The experimental training sessions then took place at the two schools chosen for the study. The researcher, with the assistance of the guidance counsellors in the schools as research assistants, conducted a training programme which was held for eight weeks for both the treatment and control group. The treatment sessions were carried out in the school's counselling centres. The day and time for each group's training were established and maintained throughout the treatment. Each training session lasted for 50 minutes using the counselling scheduled periods as specified by the schools. The participants in the experimental groups were Anyamene, Ada; Anakwuba, Celestina Adaku EFFECT OF SELF-MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUE ON LATE COMING AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOLS STUDENTS IN AWKA SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, NIGERIA trained on self-management techniques while those in the control group were received the usual conventional group counselling. Each of the groups received training for eight weeks. After the eight weeks of treatments, the ticking of the register still went on for three weeks. The data collected afterwards was regarded as the post-treatment data. The post-treatment data were collated, joined with the pre-treatment data and given to the researcher for analysis.

Method of Data Analysis
The data collected was compiled, analysed and presented in a tabular form. The data was used to answer the research questions, indicating both the pre-treatment and posttreatment times lateness to school. The null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using the analysis of co-variance to determine the statistical significance of the difference between the variables of the study.

Results
The data analysed are presented as follows: Research Questions: What is the effect of the self-management technique on students' lateness when compared with those who received conventional counselling using their pre-treatment and post-treatment times of lateness to school?

Testing the Null Hypothesis
The effect of self-management technique on students' lateness to school is not significant using the pre-treatment and post-treatment times of lateness of students treated with the technique and those treated with conventional counselling.  Table 2 shows that at 0.05 level of significance, 1df numerator and 1539df denominator, the calculated F is 248.62 with a probability value of 0.00 which is less than the critical Pvalue 0.05. Therefore, the first null hypothesis is rejected. So, the effect of the selfmanagement technique in reducing secondary school students' times of lateness to school is significant.

Discussions
The findings of this study were discussed as follows:

The Effects of Self-management Technique on Students' Lateness to School
Findings from the study revealed that the self-management technique is effective in modifying lateness behaviour and reducing the magnitude of lateness among secondary school students. What this means is that the outcome of self-management treatment on secondary school students' habitual lateness to school was efficient, hence the technique was able to curb the students' times of lateness to school. This finding from the study is in agreement with Olanrewaju and Olufunmilayo (2014), whose study findings revealed that among the treatment programmes used in their study, self-management was found to be most effective in fostering the reduction of adolescents' potentials for terrorism and violence. This means that the self-management technique was able to modify the behavioural tendencies of adolescents to engage in acts of terrorism and violence. The reason for this is possible because self-management provides an individual with the opportunity to manage his or her own behaviour, as a result increasing appropriate behaviours. This, in turn, as depicted in this study, possibly allowed the students to monitor their behaviour, evaluate their actions periodically, and able to meet up to the appropriate time of arriving early to school.
The findings from the study further revealed that the effect of self-management on secondary school students' times of lateness to school is significant. This finding points to the fact that the change recorded when self-management treatment was administered on the students with lateness behaviour was very encouraging. The finding of the study is also in agreement with Ahmadi, Shariati, Poormansouri and Hazeghi (2015); and Olorunfemi-Olabisi and Akomolafe (2013). While Ahmadi, Shariati, Poormansouri and Hazeghi's study revealed that scores for fatigue, anxiety, depression, and stress after the intervention were significantly decreased, when compared to the preintervention, Olorunfemi-Olabisi and Akomolafe's findings showed that selfmanagement technique significantly enhanced the academic self-concept of underachievers in secondary schools. The possible reason for these findings is that, as captured by Koegel and Koegel (2000), self-management being self-directed, could be easily adapted and employed in a wide variety of natural settings and can allow the student to manage the behaviour in the absence of a treatment provider for possibly long periods of time. In other words, one can easily attest to the idea that, like self-concept, terrorism and violence, issues like lateness to school bothers more on the students taking a personal decision and working towards achieving the set objectives that he or she needs to arrive at school on time.
Consequently, in the treatment process, it becomes the counsellor's goal to transfer much management of the student's behaviour to the student him or herself during the treatment. Eventually, the student becomes able to manage his or her own behaviour, thus increasing appropriate behaviours and improving the times of the students' arrival to school.

Conclusions
Based on the findings of this study, the self-management technique is effective in modifying lateness behaviour and reducing the magnitude of lateness among secondary school students.

Recommendations
Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made: 1. Self-management technique is an effective technique for modifying students' lateness behaviour for practicing counsellors. Therefore, practicing counsellors should adopt the use of these techniques in counselling secondary school students to avert lateness behaviour. 2. School principals should encourage students with a record of lateness to school to go for counselling so that the counsellor, through the application of selfmanagement technique would help them overcome their challenge of lateness to school.