Thursday 3 March 2016

EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT FACTORS AND SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE


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.

Development: is the increase in growth

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