Self-Esteem as a Correlate of Academic Performance among Secondary School Students in Enugu State

Self-esteem is an important psychological construct in all aspect of life especially in teaching and learning. This is because it affects the physical, social, emotional and academic well-being of an individual. A healthy self-esteem produces a healthy individual whose mindset is geared with “i can” attitude towards life because of its evaluative scale of the extent a person can go in life. Therefore this paper examines self-esteem as a correlate of academic performance among secondary school student in Enugu state. Literary research and different academic work in self-esteem expanded the investigation. One research question and hypothesis guided the study accordingly. Rosenberg self-esteem scale face validated by three experts in the field of Educational Psychology and Measurement and Evaluation were administered to randomly selected 600 students in Agbani Education zone. Descriptive statistics were used to answer the research question while Person Product Moment Correlation was used to analyze hypothesis. Cronbach alpha was used to obtain the reliability co-efficient of 0.73. The findings of the study indicated that high self-esteem is an important correlate of academic performance of a student as it affects the motivation to learn, mindset, worthiness, and perseverance of a student amidst academic challenges. It was recommended amongst others that students should be engaged in psychotherapy in order to work on behavioural issues they have. Discovery method and peer-to-peer learning should also be initiated in secondary schools in order to encourage student to believe in themselves and their ability in order to perform better academically