Instrumental support and dietary habits as predictors of academic achievement among secondary school students in civic education subject in southeast, Nigeria The study was guided by two research questions and 2 null hypotheses. A descriptively correlational survey research design was employed. The study utilized a multistage sampling design in selecting 2,856 SS II students from the population of 57,120 SS II students offering Civic Education in public secondary schools across the five states of South East, Nigeria. We used three instruments for data collection, these are the Instrumental Support Scale (ISS), Dietary Habits Scale (DHS) and The Civic Education Achievement Test (CEAT). The instruments were subjected to validation by three experts in Guidance and Counselling, Educational Psychology and Measurement and Evaluation, from the College of Education, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. For ISS and DHS, Pearson Product-Moment Correlation yielded stability coefficients of 0.83 (p < 0.001) and 0.82 (p < 0.01), while Cronbach’s alpha provided reliability estimates of α = .73 and α = .81, respectively. C. CEAT: Kuder-Richardson 21 was used to identify the internal reliability of CEAT, and the coefficient was found to be equal to 0.79. Analysis of Suzanne’s data was performed at the 0.05 significance level using Pearson Product-Moment Correlation, coefficient of determination (R²), linear regression, and multiple regression. Result: Instrumental support was the strongest predictor to civic education results (39.5%), and so did diet quality index-12 (diet habits,27%) of it on academic achievement. The study concluded that appropriate education on both instrumental support and healthy consumption behavior are important factors for the successful academic success of secondary school students.

Key words: Instrumental Support, Dietary Habits, Civic Education.