EDUCATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT FACTORS AND SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
CHAPTER
ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Education
in a broad sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the
mind, character or physical ability of an individual. Technically, education is
the process by which the society deliberately transmits its accumulated
knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another (Olelewe and Amaka,
2011).The educational system in Nigeria is classified essentially into primary,
secondary and tertiary levels with the philosophy aimed at development of an
individual into a sound and effective citizen, integration of the individual into
the community and provision of equal access to educational opportunities for
all citizens of the country at primary, secondary and tertiary levels (FGN, 2004).
The primary goal of the Nigerian
educational system is to provide functional education for the nation, so that
the products of the educational system can be employable or be
self-employed. Nigerian education, as in other countries, is one with
sub-systems reflected in a number of tiers – pre-primary, primary, secondary
and tertiary. The Nigerian education system is faced with intractable
problems at each of these tiers. One of such is the notable poor academic
performance at the various tiers. Researchers, such as Ibidapo-Obe (2007)
and Abebe (retrieved, 2010), have written on the prevalent falling standard of
Nigerian education and no tier is exempted. Ibidapo-Obe notes the
functional relationship between the education sub-systems such that a fault or
defect in one affects others. Poor academic performance at various
educational levels can be traced to the various components of the program such
as goals and objectives, selection and organization of learning experiences,
resources and feedback strategies as well as the human agents involved, that
is, the learner and the teacher. Some constraining problems identified by
UNESCO (1998) are shortage of human, financial and material resources, standard
maintenance, relevance, equity, inept managerial and administrative machinery,
political turbulence, blind ideological commitments and lack of
direction. Abebe (retrieved, 2010), while identifying brain-drain and
lack of vision in staff development as part of the problems of Nigerian
education, notes that there are drawbacks to, and hindrances in the development
and formulation of possible remedies.
Since early 1970s, rural development has been identified as
a strategy for improving the economic and social life of the rural inhabitants
in Nigeria. Since then successive government at various levels embarked on
several programmes aimed at rural development. A few of those programmes are
the national Accelerated food projection programme, the River Basin Development
Authorities, the Agricultural Development Project, the Green Revolution
Programme, Operation Feed the nation and poverty Alleviation programme. All
these programmes aimed at meeting the basic needs of the rural people, besides,
some basic infrastructural facilities are lacking in our rural communities.
Some of these amenities that are insufficient include; health facilities, good
roads, pipe borne water and educational facilities etc.
With the passage of time, settlements grow in size
and complexity. All present day cities were once villages or small towns or
countryside. Their growth to urban status is due largely to a combination of
factors which includes availability of social facilities such as good roads,
electricity, health facility, communication network, industries that provide
employment opportunities and easy means of transportation. The availability of
these facilities have often made the large towns and cities places of great
excitement to rural folk who often move in from near and distant villages to
increase the population of the urban centers. At the same time there is the
depopulation of the rural areas (Hornby, 2000; Adeleke and Leong, 1981). The
implication of this settlement pattern for educational advancement in Nigeria
is that the urban centers began to attract the establishment of schools because
of the teeming population. The urban areas also began to attract teachers who
liked to settle in towns to enjoy the social amenities that are provided in the
urban areas. On the contrary, rural areas witnessed lack of establishment of schools.
Where schools are available, teachers either resist or refuse transfers to
those rural areas for lack of social amenities.
Ezewu and Tahir (1997) gave a clearer explanation of the common
situations in rural and riverine areas with regards to educational development.
This is considered appropriate here because the situations are common in
Nigeria. There has been highly inadequate quantity and quality of
infrastructures. Facilities such as market, health centers and recreational
centers, which affect settlements, are not available in the rural areas.
Other
facilities, which includes, good source of water supply, housing and
transportation are also not available in the rural areas. Ezewu and Tahir went
further to analyze the effect of the lack of these facilities in an area to
include inability to retain qualified and experienced teachers to man the few
secondary and primary schools where they exist. It should also be noted, that
this factor is responsible for lack of official records and statistics about
educational development in the rural areas, particularly as school supervisors
appointed by the state and other local government officials, appointed to
monitor educational development are highly infrequent in the places they are
assigned to monitor. In worse cases government monitoring officials are
non-existent in some rural areas. The effect of this is that there are no
records about educational development in many rural areas in Nigeria.
The sources of rural problems seamed to have received
different interpretations from different scholars. According to Lipton (1977)
rural people are the main source of their own difficulties by rapid population
growth. Okafor (1986) viewed the source of rural problems from a different
perspective. According to him, lack of understanding the true relationship
between the urban and rural sectors is the main issue at stake. As he observed,
the relationship should be symbiotic in nature as opposed to the exploitation
type that is existing. He concluded that lack of equitable distribution of
social amenities with in urban and rural areas is the main bare of contenting
coupled with high level of illiteracy among the rural populace.
Education in a broad sense is any act or
experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical
ability of an individual. Technically, education is the process by which the
society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values
from one generation to another (Olelewe and Amaka, 2011).The educational system
in Nigeria is classified essentially into primary, secondary and tertiary
levels with the philosophy aimed at development of an individual into a sound
and effective citizen, integration of the individual into the community and
provision of equal access to educational opportunities for all citizens of the
country at primary, secondary and tertiary levels (FGN, 2004).
In Nigeria,
it is stated in the National Policy on Education (FRN, 1998) that the federal
government has adopted education as an instrument for effecting National
development, this was the drives behind the establishment of schools in the
rural areas in recent time. The idea therefore is aimed at bring education to
the door post of the rural populace. What is not farfetched after all, is the
effect of such proliferation in our educational system. This seems to have
contributed immensely towards educational imbalance. Generally, education is
the process by which parents, communities and home would the individual by
subjecting him or her to a selected contributed environment for the purpose of
attaining social competence and optimal individual development, Aliobu (2005),
therefore, education is seen as the major instrument, which can be used for
developing our rural areas.
Secondary schools not only occupy a strategic place in the
educational system in Nigeria, it is also the link between the primary and the
university levels of education. According to Asikhai (2010), education at
secondary school level is supposed to be the bedrock and the foundation towards
higher knowledge in tertiary institutions. It is an investment as well as an
instrument that can be used to achieve a more rapid economic, social,
political, technological, scientific and cultural development in a country. It
is rather unfortunate that the secondary schools today are not measuring up to
standard expected of them. There have been public outcries over the
persistently poor performance of secondary school students in public
examinations. According to Nwokocha & Amadike (2005), academic performance
of students is the yardstick for testing educational quality of a nation.
Hence, it is expedient to maintain a high performance in internal and mostly
external examinations. For some years now, reports on the pages of newspapers
and research findings have shown the abysmal performance of students of
secondary schools in public examinations. Ajayi (2002), Nwokocha & Amadike
(2005), WAEC (2007), The Punch newspaper (September 27, 2008), Adeyemi (2008)
and Asikhia (2010) have all shown the extent of poor performance of students in
public examinations. The persistent decline in students’ performance in public
examinations is not only frustrating to the students and the parents, its
effects are equally grievous on the society. The problem of downward trend in
academic performance of students has often been attributed to a number of
factors among which are: the principal’s leadership style, teacher quality,
home factors, government factors and non-provision of educational resources
(human, material, financial physical resources). However, this study was
limited to the provision of human and material resources as potent factors for
students’ academic performance.
The
availability of educational resources (human and material) is very important
because of its role in the attainment of educational objectives. Human
resources is a unique educational input necessary for the overall development
of skill acquisition and literacy of the students. Human resources within the
educational system can be classified into teaching and non-teaching staff.
Availability of these classes of resources are needed to achieve excellence in
the system. However, it has been observed that secondary schools in rural areas
do not have the required number of teachers (both in terms of quantity and
quality). This is evident in high student-teacher ratio in the schools. Observation
has also shown that material resources are in short supply in the schools, the
poor status of material facilities in the schools is not unconnected with the
dearth of fund in the system. A close look at the schools and what goes on
there shows that nothing good can come out of most public schools as they do
not have facilities and adequate and appropriate human resources to prepare
candidates for West African Examination Council (WAEC) examinations (Owoeye
& Yara, 2011). The precarious situation of lack of human and material
resources is more evident in public schools than in the private schools and
this shows why the private schools tend to perform better than the public
schools in public examinations. Ekundayo (2009) in a study conducted in Ekiti
State submitted that private secondary schools had educational materials better
than the public schools. Studies on the relationship between availability of
human resources and academic performance have shown that human resources
enhances academic performance of students. George (1976), Oni (1992), Adedeji
(1998), Ayodele (2000), Adewuyi (2002) and Okandeji (2007) had in their various
researches submitted that teachers constitute a very significant factor to
students’ success. In a similar dimension, Adedeji (1998), Owoeye (2000), Ajayi
(2002), Akomolafe (2003, 2005) and Owoeye (2011) also submitted a positive
relationship between material resources in schools and students’ academic
performance. According to Hallack (1990), the material resources that
contribute to students’ performance include: classrooms, accommodation,
libraries, furniture, apparatus and other instructional materials. In lieu of
the above stated views, this research is embarked upon to investigate
educational development and students’ academic performance in rural areas.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
There
is a growing awareness that research reports on educational development in
Nigeria has traditionally focused on studies carried out in the cities.
Statistics available on educational development are mainly on enrolment in
schools in the urban centers. A substantial literature focuses on the nature of
educational provisions in the urban towns in the country. It is easy to talk of
the number of primary and secondary schools in towns like Lagos, Yenegoa,
Calabar, Benin city, Kaduna and Kano, to mention but a few. Such statistics are
hardly available about educational development in the rural areas. In contrast
to the traditional approach of using the provided educational statistics about
schools located in the urban centers in Nigeria to generalize for the urban and
rural areas, whose figures are never really available, there has arisen therefore
the need for a broader conceptualization of educational development in Nigeria
to incorporate the much neglected rural areas. This, too, has necessitated the
prescription of multilevel analysis and micro approach as more comprehensive
models of research that can integrate insights gleaned from macro approaches to
the educational development in Nigeria (Bray and Thomas, 1995). Consequently,
here is a growing awareness of the importance of having an understanding of the
differences within territories, since only an analysis of these differences
will allow for an understanding of the inequalities in educational development
between the urban towns and the rural areas, which do not show up in national
statistics and analysis.
In
view of the above, this research work attempts to investigate the factors
affecting educational development and students’ academic performance in rural
areas of Ogun Water-side.
1.3 Research
Questions
The
following research questions shall be examined in this study:
1. What is the effect of the prevalence of multiple
systems of education on students academic performance?
2. Of what effect is an unstable curriculum and subject
syllabuses affects students academic performance in rural areas of Ogun Waterside
L.G.A.
3. Unstable staff in rural schools are of no significance
to students’ academic performance?
4. Does poorly-equipped libraries, laboratories and classrooms
cause any problem to students academic performance?
1.4 Objectives
of the study
The broad aim of this study is to investigate the
factors that are affecting educational development and students’ academic performance
in rural area. It is specifically intended to be carried out in secondary
schools in Ogun Waterside Local Government Area of Ogun State, while objectives
would be to:
i.
Identify the
factors that are affecting educational development in Nigeria
ii.
Identify the
factors that are affecting educational development in rural areas
iii.
Causes of
students poor academic performance in Nigeria
iv.
Causes of
secondary students poor academic performance in Ogun Waterside L.G.A of Ogun
State.
1.5 Significance of the Study
The
study would throw more light into the factors affecting educational development
in rural areas in particular and Nigeria as a whole. It would be of great
assistance to educational planner by revealing to them the causes of poor
educational development in rural areas of the country.
It
would also assist the educational administrators and school managers on how to
handle and control the school resources and its environment in order to achieve
its stated objective.
The
outcome of the study will enhance students’ academic performance in their
subjects.
1.6 Scope
of the study
The study focused on factors affecting educational development and
students’ academic performance in rural areas. A case study of secondary schools
in Ogun Waterside L.G.A of Ogun State.
Thus, the study covers the entire population of secondary schools in Ogun Waterside L.G.A of Ogun State
where five secondary schools will be choosing for the study:
1.
Abigi
Community Grammar School, Abigi
2.
Ilusin Grammar
School, Ilusin
3.
Ibiade
Community Grammar School, Ibiade
4.
Efire Community Grammar School, Efire
5.
Hammadia
Comprehensive High School, Oni
1.7 Operational Definitions of Terms
It
is the intention of the researcher to provide meaning to the following
terminologies:
Academic
Performance: How well a student meets standards set out by government and
the institution itself which resulted to the importance of students doing well
in school that has caught the attention of parents, legislators and government
education departments alike,
Performance:
Is defined as the observable or measurable
behaviour of a person or animal in a particular situation usually experimental
situation
Rural
areas: these are under developed communities.
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