Availability of Intellectual Development Programmes in Primary School Libraries and Their Impact on Pupils’ Academic Performance

Intellectual development of children is initiated by education and library is one of the core aspects of education. Intellectual development is concerned with how various mental processes like attention span, reasoning, learning, remembering and problem-solving develop from birth until adulthood. Given this, there is a direct connection between the library resources and programmes and the ultimate development of the intellect of the child. This work understudied ten (10) selected private primary schools from South-East and South-South geopolitical zones of Nigeria to determine the available intellectual development programmes and resources of their libraries. The test scores of 300 pupils in six subjects were taken before and after intensive exposure to the intellectual development programmes to establish their effect on academic performance. The findings indicated the availability of such programmes as well as print resources for developing the pupils’ intellect but very few electronic resources. The one-sample T-test was employed to test the positive significant effect of available intellectual development programmes in improving pupils’ academic performance. The calculated value (24.28177) of the student t-test statistic is greater than the tabulated value (1.6715) at 0.05 level of significance and therefore rejected the null hypothesis that there’s no positive significant effect of available programmes in improving pupils’ academic performance cross all selected primary schools in the states. The findings of the study led to the conclusion that there is a significant positive impact of intellectual development programmes on pupils’ academic performance.