Relationship between Secondary School Categorization and Value- Added Progress in Public Secondary Schools in Nandi County, Kenya

Abstract

Education processes should lead to the cumulative acquisition of knowledge, skills and values needed for holistic development. However, the current assessment practices in the Kenyan education system focus on the cognitive part of learning at the expense of the affective and psychomotor domains. Therefore, the learners’ assessment should use approaches that assess value addition to the critical attributes of holistic development. This study examined the value-addition of learners’ holistic development in different public secondary schools in Kenya. The study’s specific objectives were: To determine value addition on student academic performance by different categories of public secondary schools in Nandi County. Holistic learning and Multiple Intelligence Theories guided the study. The study adopted a post-positivist research paradigm and a mixed research design that used questionnaires and document analysis to collect information from School principals and form four students. The study’s target population was 192 secondary schools, 192 Principals and 10,499 students. The respondents were stratified into National, Extra- County, County, and Sub- County Schools. The study used stratified, proportionate, and purposive sampling to select respondents who included 144 principals from 2 National schools, 4 Extra County schools, 26 county schools, and 112 sub-county schools. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine value addition on academic performance. The residual values of multiple regression analysis were; National, Extra- County, county and sub-county were –2.541, -3.152, -2.690 and -4.094, respectively. These residuals show that in all the categories, there was no value addition to the learners’ academic performance in the selected schools. Therefore, this study recommended that; schools adopt a robust assessment method that shows how schools have added value to the learners in a holistic manner. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education should cascade the competency-based curriculum introduced recently at the lower primary level to all levels of the education system.