Institutional factors influencing students’ performance in diploma technical examinations in national youth service training institutions in Nairobi City County, Kenya

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the institutional factors influencing students’ performance in diploma technical examinations in National Youth service training institutions in Nairobi, Kenya. The study objectives were to establish the influence of adequacy of teaching and learning resources, teacher-student ratio, and principals’ supervision of teaching activities and determine the influence of level of adequacy on performance of service men and women in diploma technical examinations. The study employed ex posto facto design which is used when the researcher cannot manipulate independent variable since the manifestation had already occurred. Random sampling was employed to select thirty lecturers across departments involved, stratified sampling to select three hundred service men and women as per course enrolment and purposive sampling to select nine heads of departments from National Youth Service Engineering Institute, National Youth Service Institute of Business Studies and National Youth Service Technical Institute. Both questionnaires and observation list were used in data collection. SPSS was used to generate frequencies, cross- tabulation, chi-square tests and correlation coefficient statistics that were used to answer research questions. All tests were done at 0.05 level of significance for both t-square and Chi-tests. The major findings of the were that:-teaching and learning resources, teacher student ratio, supervision of lecturers and adequacy of physical resources influenced performance in diploma technical examinations in National Youth Service institutions. The study recommended increase teaching and learning resources, employment of more lecturers, increased supervision frequency and physical facilities in NYS training institute. Further studies should be replicated in the other fourteen institutions in National Youth Service and in different ministries to establish whether there is a variance in performance in diploma technical examinations, studies on other factors influencing performance other than those done by this study