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