INFLUENCE OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE (A CASE STUDY OF SS2 AND SS3 STUDENTS IN UYO LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA) CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the Study

Students’ academic gain and learning performance is affected by numerous factors including gender, age, self-concept peer group, level of ability, method of teaching, teachers’ personal characteristics, interest in the subject, classroom, environment, psychological environment, residential area of students’ social and economic background, and many others.

Many researchers conducted detailed studies about the factors contributing to students performance at different study levels Graet (1995) suggested “A student’s educational success is contingent heavily on social status of student’s parents/guardians in the. “Considine and Zappala (2002) noticed that parents’ income or social status positively affects the student test score in examinations.

In Akwa Ibom State, academic performance of students is very important to students, parents, teachers and other stakeholders. Like in other places where students are found, students in Akwa Ibom State also share the effect of the above factors influencing academic performance. These factors either have positive or negative influence on their academic performance. The researcher having given careful consideration to all these factors and discovered that some are dependent on others concluded that, the social and economic status of parents and guardians are very important factors. It is against this background that the evaluation of impact of socio-economic background of students on their academic performance becomes absolutely imperative. It is aimed at investigating the possibility of parental socio-economic background playing a significant role on students’ academic performance taking some selected secondary schools in Uyo Local Government Area.

1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

There has been general comment on students’ poor performance in the recent time; people tend to attribute this to the socio-economic status of parents. Their observation is that social and economic status of parents/guardians have exerted significant influence on academic performance of their wards, and that main source of academic imbalance among students and students’ success contingent very strongly on their parents’/guardians’ social and economic standard. Therefore, the problem of this study is to investigate the influence of socio-economic background on students’ academic performance in Uyo Local Government Area.