Abstract
This paper reports the results of a study that investigated secondary school learners’ perceptions of the influence of their science and mathematics teachers’ nonverbal communication on their aspirations to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related courses in institutions of higher learning. The study further investigated if there were gender differences in learners’ perceptions. The nonverbal aspects of communication focused on were teachers’ actions in class and their dressing and grooming. A sample of 465 form three secondary school learners was selected using stratified simple random sampling technique, out of whom 221 were female while 244 were male from Nakuru County, Kenya. Data was collected using a secondary school learner’s questionnaire. The reliability of the questionnaire was estimated using Cronbach alpha and yielded a coefficient of 0.88. The findings show that learners’ perceived their teachers’ nonverbal communication moderately influences their aspirations to pursue STEM. However, the perception on the influence of maintaining eye contact when asking and responding to questions and being always clean and neat were high. Therefore, science and mathematics teacher education programs should enhance pre and in service teacher awareness of the effect of their nonverbal behaviour on their learners. The Teachers Service Commission which is the national teacher regulator and employer in Kenya should ensure that the policy guidelines on teachers’ dressing and grooming are straightforwardly interpreted by all teachers and properly enforced.
Highlights
I-Want-To-Be-University (IWTBU) is a medium-sized public, primarily undergraduate teaching college in an urban setting in the Southeast
Federal adjustments to the Pell program provide a useful foil for testing the efficacy of need-based aid because it yields variation in the access and level of financial aid that can be legitimately assumed to be exogenous to unobserved student attributes that relate to the level of aid awards
The econometric advantages of the Pell program combined with its size, breadth of student coverage, and longevity have led it to be the focus of considerable academic interest
Summary
I-Want-To-Be-University (IWTBU) is a medium-sized public, primarily undergraduate teaching college in an urban setting in the Southeast. Michael Vaughn, Director of Institutional Research, has worked at IWTBU for 30 years and has seen a lot of change. He has seen public support for higher education decrease and a smaller portion of the institutional budget subsidized by the state, making the institution more dependent on students who can pay full price. Thomas (2006) noted that the topic of survey sampling has received relatively little attention in the higher education research literature. This is surprising because the selection of a sampling strategy can substantially affect population estimators and have serious consequences for decision making. In a climate of anticipating large-scale social returns to such investments, it followed that both taxpayers and politicians had interest in supporting basic access to higher education
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