The Effect of School Feeding Practice on Academic Performance in Arua District: A Case Study of St. Peter Claver Primary School, Ndirea, Subcounty Terego County
Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of feeding practice on academic performance of P6 pupils in St. Peter Claver P/S Ndirea. The assessment was made on sex, age, education level of father, education level of mother, feeding practice, attendance level, distance to school and academic performance as a dependent variable. Primary data source from St. Peter Claver P/S Ndirea was got from the P6 pupils using a sample of 72 pupils. The analysis was made at three different levels that is; frequency distribution and summary of statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients, ANOVA and the multiple linear regression.
In the results, the average age of the pupils was 14 years and close to seven (7) out of every ten (10) pupils were males. The mean academic performance of pupils was 39% which indicated a low academic performance among P6 pupils of St. Peter Claver P/S, Ndirea.
At bivariate level, the research showed that there was a significant relationship between attendance level which was measured by whether or not a pupil understand things in class and academic performance (P=0.0288<0.05), the number of times a pupil eats in a day which was an indicator of feeding practice and academic performance (p=0.025<0.05) while the rest of the variables that is sex, age, education level of father, education level of mother, distance to school were not significantly related to their academic performance (P>0.05).
In the multivariate analysis pupils’ age and time of arrival after 9:30am, distance near to school, number of times a pupil eats in a day was significantly associated with pupils’ academic performance(p<0.05) meaning feeding practice is a factor that affects academic performance. Other factors that affect academic performance are arrival time, distance to school, and pupils’ age. In general, the mean academic performance of the pupils was 39 which was so low among the pupils which indicated low academic performance.
In conclusion, all the other hypotheses were accepted except pupils’ academic performance and feeding practice are not related, pupils’ academic performance and age are not related, pupils’ academic performance and arrival time are not related, pupils’ academic performance and distance are not related which were rejected. There is a negative relationship between academic performance and the three explanatory factors that is; age, distance to school, and the time of arrival while the number of times a pupil eats in a day has a positive relationship with academic performance. Therefore, these explanatory factors significantly affected the pupils’ academic performance. The study recommends that pupils should join primary school at an early age, their
distance to school should be moderate, their feeding practice should be good and their time of arrival at school should be before 9:30 am if they are to increase their academic performance.