PARENTING STYLES AND STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL BIOLOGY IN EDO STATE: IMPLICATIONS FOR COUNSELLING

Abstract

This study investigated parenting styles and students’ performance in secondary school Biology in Esan Central Local Government, Edo State. Three parenting styles - authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles and secondary school students’ achievement were considered. This study adopted the ex-post facto research design. The population of this study covers all the 3,241 Senior Secondary School (SSS) one and two students in the 16 public secondary schools in Esan West Local Government Area of Edo State. The simple random sampling technique was adopted to select 20 Senior Secondary School Students from each of the 16 schools given a total of 320. The instrument Parenting Styles Scale (PSS) was adopted from the work of Gafoor and Kurukkan (2014). The test-retest method was used to determine the reliability of the instrument at 0.87 index. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation statistics was used to test the hypothesis. The test of hypotheses was conducted at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful parenting styles and secondary school students’ achievement in Esan Central Local Government, Edo State. It is thereby recommended that parents should know the value of reinforcement and motivation and apply those principles in a positive way to enhance better educational outcome for their children.