Determinants of Senior High School Students' Performance in the Physical Sciences in the Twifo – Hemang Lower Denkyira District: The Interplay of Ambition and Effort as Mediating Variables

Abstract

The study aims to find out whether the family, peers, teachers, gender, students' perception, students' ambition, and the academic effort of students do influence students' performance in the physical sciences in the Twifo-Hemang Lower Denkyira District. There has been wide speculation as to why the performance of students in the physical sciences continues to fall and what could be done to remedy this poor trend. On the one hand, performance has been attributed to environmental factors. In Ghana, research on factors influencing students' academic performance especially in the physical sciences at the Senior High level appears to be relatively limited. Specifically speaking, such research in the Twifo-Hemang Lower-Denkyira District is virtually nonexistent. The research designs for this study were descriptive and correlational research designs with quantitative methods of data collection. The population of the study was three hundred and eighty (380) physical science students in the Twifo-Hemang Lower Denkyira District. The population for the study included all the senior high schools in the Twifo-Hemang Lower Denkyira District. Purposive sampling technique was used in selecting a sample for the study which was 194, thus 114 (58.8%) male students and 80 (41.2%) female students. Questionnaire and test items were used in collecting data for this study. Analysis of the data was done through the use of the SPSS version 22. The study revealed that there is a strong and positive relationship between family influence, teachers' influence, peer influence, gender, academic effort and students' performance in Physics, Chemistry and Elective Mathematics.