SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS ON THE INFLUENCE

Abstract

Guidance and counselling services in a school play a major role in school adjustment of students and the subsequent achievement of their full potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate secondary school students’ perceptions on the influence of guidance and counselling services on their school adjustment in Keiyo North SubCounty. The objectives of the study were to investigate students’ perceptions on the influence of guidance and counselling services on school adjustment and to establish the influence of gender, school type and class level on students’ perceptions on the influence of guidance and counselling services on their overall school adjustment. The study was anchored on the Social cognitive theories of perception. The study adopted a mixed approach research methodology and the ex post facto causal comparative research design. The philosophical paradigm on which the study was based is pragmatism. Stratified and random sampling techniques were used to select seven schools out of the 21 schools and 367 out of the 8001 students in the sub-county secondary schools. Also, 16 participants were purposively selected (one from each class level of the type of school) and interviewed. The instruments of data collection were a questionnaire and an interview schedule that was used during the interviews. The descriptive statistics used in data analysis were frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviation. The inferential statistics used were independent t-test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The hypotheses were tested at a significance level of 0.05. The qualitative data was analyzed using selective coding to establish the common themes emerging from the data. The major findings of the study showed that there were significant differences in students’ perceptions on the influence of guidance and counselling services on all the three domains of school adjustment that the study dealt with: academic adjustment F(2,326) = 52.202, p = 0.001, emotional adjustment F(2, 326) = 42.97, p=0.01 and Social adjustment F(2,326) = 50.083, p = 0.001. The results further showed that female students had higher mean perceptions (3.6391, SD .06308) than the male students (3.4000 SD .07159). The study concluded that uniformity and adequacy in provision of guidance and counselling services is lacking in secondary schools in the sub-county. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that since there exist significant differences in students’ perceptions on the influence of guidance and counselling services on their school adjustment, there was need to address the challenges and shortcomings that exist in the provision of guidance and counselling services in the schools so that all the students are adequately assisted to make the desired school adjustment. The study also showed there was the need to explore on a theory that can guide the provision guidance and counselling services in secondary schools.