Factors Influencing Academic Performance in Public Primary Schools in Kandara District, Murang’a County.

Abstract

This research problem addressed that in the last few years Kandara district has experienced anobservable poor academic performance especially in public primary school. This decline in academic performance could be associated with parenting styles, school administration factors, home, school, pupils and teacher factors. This study seeks to establish the current trend of poor performance in public primary school at Kandara constituency. The study will conduct review of documented work carried out by other researchers. This study will be guided by classical liberal theory by Charles Darwin. It will employ descriptive design and it will be carried out in public primary schools at Kandara district. The target population will be six(6) public primary schools, seven hundred and twenty (720) pupils, fifty (50) teachers, six head teachers(6) will be selected using simple random sampling that will be used for data collection to ensure validity and reliability of instruments, piloting will be carried in two schools that will be included in actual study. The data will be obtained to establish whether there is relationship between the dependant variable of poor performance and the selected independent variable will be analyzed through means, frequencies and percentages. The data was analyzed in a way of descriptive statistics and presented in form of frequency tables percentages and statistics. The study found that the situation of failure to have constant motivational programmes which causes poor performance.This was confirmed by 60% of the respondents. It also found that the student personalities caused poor performance. This was attributed to their character traits and allied environmental factors in the growth and developmental process. The study equally found that high thresholds of the discipline standard had greatly reduced and forestall poor performance. This was confirmed by all the respondents. The study recommended that the school should have continous motivational programmes for the pupil fraternity. This will ensure that the pupil who have the ability to good performance will not get demotivated by the others . The study proposed that the school should always seek to understand the different individual personality traits of the pupil as a measure to reduce poor performance. They should seek to provide the pupil with avenues to ventilate and reduce anxiety and performance induced stress in relation to the pressure accruing from academics. The study proposed enforcement of very high discipline standards in the schools to check the situation of poor performance.