Thesis:

Investigation of resources and conditions on students’ academic performance in public secondary day schools in Kisii central sub-county kenya

Kenya is determined to provide free basic secondary education to all its citizens. However, in spite of all these efforts, the Education sector in Kenya continues to face number of problems, especially declining performance of pupils in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE). Kisii Central sub-county is one of the sub counties in Kenya faced by poor academic performance. This study was designed to examine factors leading to poor academic performance in Kenya certificate of Secondary education in Secondary day schools in Kisii Central sub-county. The study was guided by the following objectives : To find out effect of teaching and learning resources on students’ academic performance; and to establish the effect of home based factors on students’ academic performance in secondary day schools in Kisii Central Sub County. The target area for this study was Kisii Central sub-county which has a total number of 151 secondary day schools comprising of 33121 students enrolled in the schools and a teacher population of 1035. The targeted population was 1579 respondents who were sampled from 101 secondary day schools. This comprised of principals, teachers, board of management members and Form four students. Simple random sampling procedure was used to get the sample size of 236 respondents from 17 secondary day schools in the sub county that were sampled as follows 17 principals, 47 class teachers, and 17 BOM members and 176 class form four students, where 10 students were drawn from each stream. Descriptive survey design was adopted to describe the findings. Questionnaires were used as tools to collect data. Pilot study was conducted to ensure reliability and validity of the data collection instrument. The collected data was analysed by both descriptive and inferential statistics where descriptive statistics involved mean and percentages. Inferential statistics involved regression analysis. It was then presented in form of charts and frequency tables. The study found out that inadequate resources and classrooms affected teachers’ service delivery thus, posed a challenge in improving students’ academic performance. The study concluded that lack of teaching materials such as libraries, textbooks, science laboratories and inadequate laboratory chemicals and equipment contribute greatly to poor academic performance. It was also concluded that schools in the sub-county had teacher shortage which affected effective teaching and learning. The study also concluded that socio-economic factors such as parental occupation and parental level of education affected students’ performance in Academic in the sub- county. The study therefore concluded that teachers’ influence affected performance of the learner. The study recommends that schools should be provided with the required facilities to facilitate proper learning. Principals who are school managers should ensure that the teachers prepare adequately the requisite professional documents and they should frequently supervise them in their content delivery to ensure that there is quality teaching.