ABSTRACT

The study investigated the extent Mentorship Characteristics of Principals Correlates with Effective Administration of Secondary School Principals in South East, Nigeria. To guide the study, eight research questions and eight null hypotheses were raised. It adopted a correlational research design.  Population is made up of 1, 430 principals, 27, 431 teachers in Public Secondary Schools in South East, Nigeria. The study samples were 333 principals 385 teachers selected via simple random sampling techniques. Two instruments titled: “Mentorship Characteristics of Principals Questionnaire” (MCPQ) and “Effective Administration of Secondary Schools Questionnaire” (EASSQ) were developed by the researcher. The instruments were validated by three   experts in the College of Education, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, to ascertain their relevance in the study. Two from Department of Educational Management and one from Measurement and Evaluation. Test re-test method was to establish the stability and Internal consistency of the instrument via Cronbach alpha and the values of 0.81, 0.78, 0.79, 0.73, 0.71, 0.76, 0.74 and 0.72 for MCPQ and 0.79 for EASSQ were obtained respectively. The research instrument were administered by the researcher and research assistants, who were properly-briefed. They retrieved the duly filled instruments at a return rate of 97%, while a total of 3% were either not filled or discarded by some uncooperative respondents.  Data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer question (1), and Pearson Product Moment Correlation (r) for questions 2- 8, while Simple Linear Regression was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance.   Findings of the study revealed that listening skill, experience, willingness  to share skills, human relation, empathy skills, motivation skills and others are the mentoring characteristics of principals that relates to effective administration and that there was very high significant  relationship between the extent of principals mentoring characteristics and effective administration of secondary schools in South East, Nigeria. Based on the findings, it was recommended amongst others that school principals should increase their number of mentorship characteristics skills to enhance effective administration in secondary schools.