Home Characteristics and the Academic Performance

This study investigated the relationship between home characteristics (parental involvement in school activities, parents¿ absence from home, parents¿ educational background, and the major economic activity of parents) and students¿ academic performance among public junior high school (JHS) students in Moree, Central Region of Ghana. The sample consisted of 200 students selected by the simple random sampling technique. Parents of these 200 students responded to a questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of .719. Spearman¿s Rank Correlation Coefficient (¿) was used to measure the strength of the relationship. Key findings suggested that there was weak relationship between these home characteristics and students¿ academic performance and the correlations involved in the relationships were not significant. It was thus concluded that, though home characteristics were not found to be significantly associated with academic performance, parents need to know their role in educating their wards recommending that School Management Committees (SMCs), Parents Teacher Association (PTA) and Ghana Education Service (GES) sensitize parents to get genuinely involved in their wards¿ education.