CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Background of the Study

Meaning of academic performance of student is challenging, since science student performance is the produce of socio-economic, psychological and environmental factors. Education ought to be growing as a profitable industry with prime objective of maximizing profit by delivering high quality education that produces well educated, skilled and manned student according to needs and requirement of the dynamically growing market. There are two group of student as generally perceived. That is those who improve and those who don’t improve. This student performance can be affected by different factors such as learning abilities because new paradigm about learning assumes that all student can and should learn at higher levels, but it should not be considered as constraints because there are other factors like race, gender, sex that can affect students performances (Hansen 2000).

Meshiachoudis (2001) explained the effect of age, qualification and distance from learning place on the student performance. Qualification in his explanation concerns the readiness of student in joining a particular discipline in the school for instance a student that is not capable of doing science in the secondary school joins science because his/her friends are offering the subject.

Kirby (2002) added that the academic performance of student is also affect by student impatience. Yronne (1998) further elaborated that student academic performance is very much dependent on SEB (Socio-economic background) as per his statement secondary school student performance is with satisfically significant different.