Abstract:
The study examined the influence of single parenting on the academic support of
Junior High School pupils in the Effutu Municipality in the Central Region of Ghana.
The study was grounded in the Epstein‘s six typologies of parental involvement in
school. The cross-setional survey design was used and was aligned with positivist
paradigm where 175 public junior high school pupils were chosen as a sample
through the stratified random sampling technique. A Cronbach Alpha of not less than
0.70 was realized for all the various constructs. The data gathered through
questionnaire were analysed using both descriptive (frequency, percentage, mean,
standard deviation) and inferential (t-test) statistics with the aid of Version 22 of the
Statistical Product for Service Solution (SPSS). The study revealed that the nature of
single parenthood was mother dominated in-spite of their economic challenges. It was
again, discovered that the factors affecting single parents‘ ability to support pupils‘
academic work had to do with limited parental formal education, limited income and
financial resource and difficulty in speaking the official language of the school.
Furthermore, the study showed that the main effects of single parents on academic
support of pupils featured in parental difficulty in assisting with supervision and
monitoring of homework and therefore fell largely on siblings for assistance. Others
included poor participation in PTA and SMC meetings/activities. Besides, it was
established that there is no statistically significant difference in the implications of
single parenting on academic support of male and female. Therefore, it was
recommended among others that the Effutu Municipal Education Directorate should
collaborate with school authorities and community leaders to organize seminars and
workshops for single parents to enable them monitor and supervise their children‘s
learning. Teachers should be encouraged to pay attention to single parented pupils to
help them adjust successfully to their academic work.
Description:
A thesis in the Department of Basic Education, School of
Educational and Life-Long Learning, submitted to the School of
Graduate Studies, in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Philosophy
(Basic Education)
in the University of Education, Winneba
