Citizenship Education and University Students’ Participation in Management of Election in Nigeria

This study examined citizenship education and university students’ participation in management of election in Nigeria. Two research questions and two hypotheses were formulated for the study. The study used ex-post facto research design. The population of study was 42,821 three hundred level undergraduate students in six federal universities in Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 400 students from the six universities because they take citizenship education as a core course. The researcher-developed instrument titled “Citizenship Education and Participation in Management of Election Questionnaire†. The questionnaire was face and content validated by experts in educational management and test and measurement. The criticism and suggestions of these experts were incorporated into the final draft before the copies of the questionnaire were administered to the respondents. Internal consistency reliability of the instrument using Cronbach alpha resulted in a coefficient of .78. Research questions were answered, using mean and standard deviation, while the hypotheses were tested using independent t-test. Results of the hypotheses showed significant influence of honesty and moral values influenced university students in management of election. It was concluded that citizenship education significantly influenced university students’ participation in management of election in Nigeria. Recommendations were made that university students should be seriously taught components of citizenship education such as honesty and moral values as these would equip them with qualities of truthfulness, responsibility, compassion, positive values and attitudes to contribute positively to the affairs of the country.