Influence of Parental involvement on academic Performance among secondary school Students in Wareng District, Kenya

Abstract

Academic performance is an important measure in an educational system that determines the social and economic status of persons in the society. The purpose of the study was to determine the influence of parental involvement on academic performance of secondary school students in Wareng District Kenya. Specifically, the study sought to: determine the differences between academic performance of girl students of involved parents and girl students of non-involved parents, determine the differences between academic performance of boy students of involved parents and boy students of non-involved parents, establish areas of parental involvement and establish whether motivation influence performance of secondary school students. The study was based 'on the incentive theory of motivation developed by B.F. Skinner. Descriptive survey research design was adopted. A sample of 10 mixed schools out of 38 schools was selected using simple random sampling. Stratified sampling was used to select the boys and girls in the selected schools while simple random sampling technique was then used to select the respondents for the study. A sample size of 240 respondents was used. Respondents included Form three students from the selected schools. Data collection was done with the use questionnaires and document analysis guide. Both descriptive and inferential statistics was used. The former involved frequencies and percentages while the latter utilized one-way ANOV A to test the hypotheses. The study found that none of the respondents who had non-involved parents scored above 42 marks. Secondly, learners who obtained assistance from parents performed better than those whose parents did not involve. Third, the major areas of parental involvement were: parents keeping an eye on their children's academic progress, parents' efforts to help children to learn on being successful, parents being able to provide all the basic requirements and parents getting most of the learner's information about academic progress from the report cards. Consequently, the study recommended that there is need for theministry of education and other stakeholders to sensitize parents on the importance of providing educational resources to their secondary school children in order to enable them achieve their best. It is also recommended that there is need for the school management to encourage joint meetings among teachers, students and parents in order to create awareness and understanding among parents over their responsibility to ensure that their children acquire quality education.