The Nature and Causes of Indiscipline Cases among Public Secondary School Students in Thika Sub-County, Kiambu County, Kenya (Published)
For a long time now, Kenya has continued to record increasingly disruptive cases of indiscipline among students in public schools. In response to this menace, the Kenya government has usually set up committees to investigate the root causes of and recommend concrete solutions to student indiscipline in schools. Despite many recommendations and subsequent actions by educational stakeholders, the problem of student indiscipline in, especially, Kenyan public secondary schools just seems unable to go away. Therefore, this paper attempts to understand how teachers, students and principals identify and deal with indiscipline cases in their schools so as to make recommendations that could work for every other public school. The paper is based on a case study that investigated the constraints to the development of an effective discipline culture among public secondary schools in Thika District of Kenya. The study employed a survey research design targeting a population of 144 secondary schools, all the accessible students enrolled in these schools, all the 1,753 teachers and all the 144 principals from the 144 schools. The author purposely selected 6 public secondary schools. Data for the study was collected using questionnaires administered to principals, teachers and students and the collected data was analysed descriptively. Based on the research findings, the common cases of indiscipline are: noise making, bullying, fighting, failing to complete assignments, drug abuse, sexual deviance, sneaking out of school, stealing other students’ property and general defiance of school authority and rules. The principals, teachers and students all believe that indiscipline in school can be eradicated. According to them, schools can instil a discipline culture on students through guidance and counselling, involvement of parents in dealing with issues of student behaviour, teachers closely supervising assignments and helping learners to complete difficult tasks, strengthening of peer counselling and meting out punishment against unruly students. The study recommends the need to effectively use available means of communication in schools. Students should be encouraged to express themselves through the proper channels rather than resorting to indiscipline.
Keywords: Causes, Indiscipline Cases, Kenya, Public Secondary Schools, Thika
The Evil that Men Do in Academics: Understanding Plagiarism and Its Extenuating Circumstances (Published)
This study was premised to explore the causes of plagiarism and its extenuating circumstances in Higher Educational Institutions in Ghana. The study focused on Tertiary Students in the Kumasi and Sunyani Metropolis and Municipality respectively, 200 students were selected deploying a cluster sampling technique. The underpinning research paradigm was a cross sectional descriptive survey. Questionnaires were the main instrument used in eliciting primary data for the study. Secondary data were obtained from academic journals databases including EBSCO, and Google Scholar. The analyses were presented using Means, Standard Deviations, Unweighted Means, Relative Important Index (RII), Frequencies and Percentages. The study discovered the causes of student’s plagiarism as follows; poor writing skills, to obtain better marks, poor understanding of plagiarism, cost of quality education materials, Pressure from family and friends to offer help. The plagiarism extenuating factors were also discovered as follows; educate students on writing methods, assign different questions to different individuals, give tests quizzes or assignments more, assigning more in-class activities, not allowing students make up tests, rotate curriculum and trust building. It is recommended that deploying plagiarism detective software under covert study will help understand the causal factors better in order to inoculate student’s plagiarism effectively.
Keywords: Causes, Extenuating Circumstance, Ghana, Higher Education, Plagiarism