Factors contributing to low A-level biology performance in selected secondary schools offering A-level Biology in Lira District in Northern Uganda

Abstract

The study is done to investigate the factors leading to low performance of students in biology at advance level in selected secondary schools in Lira district. The objective was to find out student related factors, school related factors including teachers, home related factors and other factors leading to low biology performance in selected secondary schools in Lira district. The method used to select respondence involve stratified sampling to obtain a given number of boys and girls in a given school, random sampling to obtain students, and purposive sampling to obtain A’ level biology teachers and data analysis using excel and Stata application. A total of 134 participants were targeted including 123 students and 11 teachers and data collection method used include questionnaire for students and structured interview guide for teachers. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. The result of the study showed that the students related factors that lead to low biology performance were; poor study style, poor attitude and behaviour of learners. The school related factors are; few biology teachers, few biology lessons in a week, lack of teaching/learning materials for biology, lack of well-equipped laboratories, lack of trained biology laboratory technician, and the home related factors were less parental support and socioeconomic factors. Major aspect of the curriculum found to contribute to low performance of learners in biology at A’ level was; nature of biology content which is wide and diverse. Several recommendations were made including; recruiting more biology teachers, provision of enough teaching and learning materials by stakeholders, improve technology in teaching/learning, reducing the amount of biology content. Study areas like assessing the extent to which the above factors lead to low biology performance, effect of sex of a teacher, effect of assessment method used was limited. The sampling size was also small. The aim of the research was however achieved.