The relationship between career aspirations, attitude towards gender specific roles and academic performance among secondary school students in Bungoma South Sub - County, Kenya

Abstract

Career aspirations, attitude towards gender specific roles and academic performance are of ultimate importance to the learning process. When students know more about available career opportunities, they will be able to focus more on their academic performance. Despite numerous changes in policy and legislation, issues of gender equity in Kenyan Education system and labour market remain a concern of the Kenyan public. It is against this background that the current study focuses on the relationship between career aspirations, attitude toward gender specific roles and academic performance among Form three students in Bungoma South sub- County. The objectives of this study were to: determine gender differences in career aspirations among secondary school students in Bungoma south sub-County; investigate the relationship between secondary school students’ career aspirations and their academic performance; establish the relationship between secondary school students’ career aspirations and their attitude towards gender specific roles; examine the relationship between gender role attitudes and academic performance of male and female high school students and lastly to assess secondary school students’ perceived barriers to their career aspirations and academic performance by gender. The study was guided by social cognitive career theory by Lent, Brown & Hackett and the research approach was quantitative. The design was expost facto. The target population was 3 762; 2 216 were male and 1 546 were female form three students of the year 2014 from selected public secondary schools in Bungoma South Sub-County. The sample size was 420 participants from 27 public secondary schools. Both stratified and random sampling techniques were used to select the sample for study. Analysis of data was done using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS statistics 20.0,2014 version) to obtain descriptive and correlation statistics of the responses. A pilot study was carried out in two schools to determine the reliability of the instruments. The two sets of the scores of the responses from the questionnaire were used to calculate Pearson moment correlation coefficient (r). The reliability coefficient r was found to be r = 0.78. Since a correlation coefficient whose magnitude is between 0.7 and 0.9 indicate variables which are considered highly correlated, the instrument was therefore considered to be reliable. Chi square results indicated that there was a significant gender differences in students’ career aspirations with X 2 (3) =12.808, P<0.05. The results from spearman rho correlation coefficient indicated a weak positive relationship between career aspirations and academic performance (rho (418) = 0.265, p < .01). Based on the findings, it was recommended that career mentorship programs should be integrated in the secondary school curriculum to enable students acquire necessary information about the nature of jobs and to develop interest in their aspired careers at an early stage. This might inform students’ subject selection, enhance their academic performance and increase chances of attaining their aspired careers.