The Importance of Educational Forum as Perceived by Students from Mataa Location, Mbooni West SubCounty

Lazarus Ndiku Makewa, Lukenya University ndikul@gmail.com
Josephine Mbithe Mutie ( Corresponding Author) Teachers Service Commission josephine.mbithe@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study was to determine how students of Mataa location perceive their educational forum when grouped according to: gender, parental support, level of education and Challenges faced. The study used descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze the collected data. The descriptive statistics used in data analysis in this study were, frequencies, percentages and standard deviation. Inferential statistics were T-test, standard deviation and percentage were used to compute data for question one. For question two T-test and ANOVA were used to test whether the perception of students varied significantly. The population for this study comprised of 300 students who attend the Mataa Education forum each year. However, during this particular day when the data was collected, 118(39%) students were absent, therefore never participated in the study. This gave 182(61%) of the students population, which was reasonable. When grouped according to gender, the perceptions of the students varied depending on the question. When grouped according to the level of education the secondary school students had high perception of the education forum than college and university students. The students felt that the forum had motivated them to improve academically, be future oriented and realize their potentials. Parental support was perceived as playing a positive role. Majority of the students in Mataa are affected by lack of school fees, learning facilities, lack of strong parental support and lack of enough role models in the locality