Relationship between Dispositional Optimism and Academic Achievement of Form Two Students in Nyandarua County, Kenya
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2024-09
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Nextgen Research Publication
Abstract
Persistent poor academic achievement in national examinations among pupils from public primary schools in Nakuru County has been considerably unsatisfactory and detrimental to the learners due to loss of educational and life rewarding opportunities. Educational research within the county with regard to the consistent huge failure rate in the past decade has majorly attributed the huge failure to school-related environmental factors. This is while little attention has been paid to psychological domains of the learners in this county. To address the continuous decline in performance, the study focused on dispositional optimism, an individual difference variable, that is considered to be key in influencing academic achievement of learners. The study was based on dispositional optimism theory. The study adopted convergent parallel mixed research design. The target population was 50750 standard eight pupils enrolled in all the 747 public primary schools in the county while the accessible population was 1364 class eight pupils from 16 public primary schools. The study sample comprised of 400 standard eight pupils selected from 16 public primary schools. Stratified and simple random which are probability sampling procedures and purposive sampling which is a non-probability sampling procedure were used in the selection of the schools and the participants. Questionnaires and interview guide were used to collect data. A pilot study was conducted among 30 class eight pupils to establish the validity and reliability of the research instruments. The study used both descriptive and relevant inferential statistical procedures to analyze the data. The results showed that dispositional optimism and academic achievement had a moderate, positive and significant correlation, r (366) = .31, p < .05. Qualitative results also revealed that high dispositional optimism was associated with high academic achievement and vice versa. The study recommends that teachers should be encouraged to build the capacity of the pupils in the primary schools so that they can be more optimistic in their academic endeavors for better achievement in academics.
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Anne, Kamau & Kinai, Theresia & Mugambi, Doyne. (2024). Relationship between Dispositional Optimism and Academic Achievement of Form Two Students in Nyandarua County, Kenya. World Journal of Research and Review. 19. 10.31871/WJRR.19.3.9.