Impact of a participatory cyber crime prevention programme on secondary school students' attainment in crime prevention concepts in civic education and social studies

Nigeria is considered by many to be a cyber crime hot spot, and is often ranked among the world's top cyber crime committing countries (e.g. advanced fee fraud is also known as Nigerian scams and 419 scams-419 is a section under the Nigerian Criminal Code Act that prohibits obtaining goods by false pretences). We designed a cyber crime prevention programme based on the action research paradigm. We the used the pretest-postest quasi experimental design to evaluate the impact of the action cyber crime prevention programme on 218 Nigerian secondary school students' attainment in Civic Education and Social Studies. The students were purposefully selected from whole classes in six secondary schools in Nigeria. Our analysis suggested that the action cyber crime prevention programme has a positive effect on students' attainment in cyber crime prevention. Future work includes extending the Action Cyber Crime Prevention Programme to a wider audience in Nigeria and other developing countries.