ASSESSMENT OF THE RATIONALITY OF SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ CHOICES OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMMES IN KWABRE DISTRICT OF GHANA

ABSTRACT

The study sought to find out whether Kwabre District Senior High School students make rational choices of academic programmes in school. The population of the study was all students in the six Senior High Schools in Kwabre District. However, the Form 3 students were purposively sampled for the study. Stratified random sampling technique with proportional allocation was used to sample 331 Form 3 students from the various programmes in each school for the study. A self-made questionnaire was used to gather data from the 331 respondents. A total of 320 copies of the questionnaire were obtained from the respondents. Statistical Product for Service Solutions was used to analyze the data. Frequencies and percentages were analyzed to answer all the research questions.

It was found out that generally Senior High School students in Kwabre District make rational choices of their programmes of study. This is because most of them assessed their strengths and weaknesses and sought information on their programmes before choosing them. Again, most of them chose their programmes based on their abilities or interests and expressed satisfaction with their programmes of study. However, few of them sought counselling from qualified counsellors before choosing their programmes. It was recommended that school counsellors should reinforce students’ rational programme choice behaviour by intensifying counselling in schools so that students will continue to make rational choices of programmes in school.