The Relationship between Secondary School Students’ Attributes and their Attitudes Towards Agriculture Subject: The Case of Migori District, Kenya

Abstract

Students acquire attitudes within their classrooms, in their homes and within their community. The study focused on secondary school students attributes related to their attitudes towards agriculture as a subject and as career goal of students within Migori district of Kenya. Success in the subject and decision to pursue agriculture at secondary levels could be attributed to their personal attributes. Enrolment in agriculture as a subject and as a career goal in Migori depends on positive attitudes cultivated amongst the students. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey research design. The target population consisted of all the form 4 students in Migori district who had made subject choices and had enrolled for Kenya National Examinations Council while the accessible population included the form 4 students in the 6 schools purposely selected for the study. Random sampling technique was used to select 100 form 4 students both taking and those not taking agriculture subject from both rural and urban district schools. A questionnaire with reliability coefficient of 0.85 and had both closed and open-ended items was used to collect data. Data was processed and analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics to test the hypotheses. Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 17 was used for the analyses. The study found out that the attitudes of school students towards agriculture as a subject and career choice was low. It concluded that there was no evidence to show that the student attitudes were related to the attributes studied. The study recommends that parents, teachers of agriculture and universities with programs which prepare professionals for agriculture-related careers to cooperate with secondary schools to provide information about a wide variety of agricultural careers and make visits to schools and produce high quality media which positively portray the wider range of opportunities of careers in agriculture.