The persistent gap between intended educational goals and actual outcomes in Nigerian public secondary schools continues to attract scholarly attention. This study examined the extent to which infrastructural development and instructional supervision predict educational outcomes in public secondary schools in Calabar Education Zone of Cross River State, Nigeria. Two research questions were raised and two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at the .05 level of significance. A correlational research design was adopted. The population comprised 94 public secondary schools in the Zone, from which 64 schools were selected using stratified random sampling. Data were collected from 640 teachers and 640 senior secondary school students using the School Development Variables Questionnaire (SDVQ) and the Educational Outcomes Questionnaire (EOQ), both validated by experts and with reliability coefficients ranging from .78 to .91. Simple linear regression and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were employed to test the hypotheses. Results revealed that infrastructural development significantly predicted educational outcomes (R² = .307, F1,62 = 27.412, p < .05) across cognitive (R² = .234), affective (R² = .215), and practical (R² = .174) dimensions. Instructional supervision emerged as the stronger predictor (R² = .445, F1,62 = 49.652, p < .05), particularly for affective outcomes (R² = .415). Both variables jointly accounted for 55.4% of the variance in educational outcomes. These findings underscore the complementary roles of physical school environments and professional supervisory systems in determining the quality of secondary school outcomes. It is recommended that government agencies prioritize sustained infrastructural investment and that school principals implement systematic instructional supervision frameworks across all schools in the Zone.
Samuel et al. (2026) studied this question.