Influence of home environment on academic performance of students in public secondary schools in Kitui west sub county, Kitui county, Kenya

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of home environment on student’s academic performance in public schools in Kitui west sub- county, Kitui County, Kenya. The study sought to determine the influence of parents’ economic status on students’ academic performance, to establish the influence of Parent/Family Involvement on students’ academic performance and to investigate the effect of parenting style on students’ academic performance in public secondary schools in Kitui west sub county, Kitui county. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. Simple random sampling was used to select the sample included in the study. The researcher studied a sample of 8 principals in 8 schools out of 28 public secondary schools,8 PTA chairpersons in the 8 selected schools out of 28 and 144 students out of population 1440 students .Target population for the study was all the principals ,students and parents of the 28 secondary schools in Kitui West Sub County Kitui County. Questionnaires were used for data collection. The collected data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics using the Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS) version 20. The findings of this study were that the parent’s economic status influences students’ academic performance (r =0.8), Parent/Family Involvement influence students’ academic performance in public secondary schools (r =0.45) and the parenting styles affects students’ academic performance in public secondary schools (r =0.049) Kitui west sub county, Kitui county to a great extent. Thus authoritative parenting was positively associated with academic performance and authoritarian and permissive parenting was negatively associated with good performance. The ANOVA results shows that there is significance between mean responses between parents' economic status and students academic performance F(dfB,dfW) =F(159,1) =7.197, p<0.05, Parent/Family Involvement and students’ academic performance F(dfBdfW) = F(159,1) = 19.75, p<0.05 and also that there is a significant difference in mean responses between parenting styles and students’ performance F(dfB,dfw) =F(93,3) =13.0, p<0.05. The multiple regression results shows that the dependent variables are significant at 0.05% significant level (p=0.003, p= 0.001 and p=0.006) respectively) and that the parenting styles predicted students’ performance significantly at 7.234.The hypotheses were tested using Pearson’s correlations, multiple regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA). From the findings of this study, the researcher recommended that the Government need to increase the bursary allocation to the students from poor families so as to retain them in school to enhance their performance. The school administration should increase the number of education days for parents so that parents can be more involved with their student’s academic performance. Parents should improve on their family leadership style since this can affect their children performance.