Moral Decadence as a Potential Predictor of Students Academic Performance in Some Selected Senior High Schools in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana

Abstract

The main objective of the study was to examine the moral decadence as a potential predictor of students’ academic performance in some selected senior high schools in the Kumasi Metropolis. Descriptive survey design was used for the study. A multistage sampling procedures namely purposive sampling, proportional sampling and simple random sampling procedures were used in the selection of the sample. A total of 338 respondents were drawn from three senior high schools in the Kumasi Metropolis. Exploratory factor analysis was done to validate the instrument as well as simple linear regression was used to test the hypothesis. Through principal component analysis (PCA), the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin yielded a value of .636, exceeding the recommended value of .6 and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance χ2(78) =360.171, p = .000), supporting the factorability of the correlation matrix. The pattern structure and the commonalities results were both inspected. Items that had loadings below 0.30 on the pattern matrix as well as the unrotated loadings of the items were deleted. The outcome of the analysis showed that two items had factor loadings below 0.30. Therefore, those items were discarded. The remaining eleven items were retained because they were all above 0.30. The results again, revealed that moral decadence was not a potential predictor of student academic performance in the Kumasi Metropolis, B = -.395, SE = .299, t = -1.322, BootCI (-.984, .193) (see Table 5). This outcome suggests that students who do not exhibit moral decadence in their schools would have higher chances of experiencing higher academic performance. The study recommends that educational directorates and head teachers need to strengthen counseling services for students in senior high schools. This may go a long way to prevent a situation whereby the country could lose most of its manpower in the near future, as moral decadence could compel some of the students to become dropouts and drug addicts.