FAMILY DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS AS PREDICTOR OF SCHOOL READINESS AMONG PRIMARY ONE SCHOOL PUPILS IN SOUTHEASTERN NIGERIA

摘要

Learning starts from birth and parents have a critical role to play to inculcate basic knowledge in children as well as getting them ready for school because they are their children’s first teacher. This study explored how various aspects of a child’s family such as family income, parents’ ‘educational level and home locations predict their readiness for primary school. Previous research findings on some of the family variablesindicated a relationship with children's readiness, while others revealed no relationship. Thus, there is a need to investigate further into these family variables (family income, parental educational level and home location) to enable one to establish the extent to which, each of them predicts school readiness among primary one pupils within Southeastern Nigeria.This study situated on Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System theory. The survey design of the correlation type was used for this study. The population of this study covered all the parents whose pupils are in primary one in public schools in Southeastern Nigeria. Simple random sample technique was used to select three states in Southeastern Nigeria namely Abia, 320; Anambra’ 416 and Imo, 418. The disproportionate sampling technique was used to pick four Local Government Areas (LGAs) from each of the selected states making 12 LGAs. Five public primary schools that were within the LGAs’ used for the study were explicitly selected through the use of purposive sampling from each LGA. Simple random sampling technique was used to select one whole primary one class from each school, all having 1,200 pupils and the parents of these pupils were used for this study. Research instruments used were Family Demographic Factors Questionnaire. Analysis of data was conducted with the aid of PPMC-Pearson-Product-MomentCorrelation, and linear regression (multiple) at 0.05significance level. The monthly FI of majority of parents (65.0%) was between N10,000-N50,000, while HL of 53.0% was urban and 75.0% did not have more than secondary education. FDF had a significant composite contribution on pupils’ school readiness (F (3;1195) = 24.65) and accounted for 5.6% of its variance. The PEL (β = 0.18; t = 6.27), HL (β = 0.16; t = 5.68) and FI (β = 0.13; t = 4.50) had significant relative contributions to school readiness. It is recommended that State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) in Southeastern, Nigeria should from time to time, organise a forum where all the stakeholders especially parents of pre- primary school children would gather and enlightened about their roles toward school readiness of their children.