An investigation on the factors contributing to poor performance in science subjects compared to humanities in secondary schools in Naivasha sub-county in Nakuru county Kenya.

Students performance in any examination depends on many variables such as type of school, qualification of teachers, students academic background, environment from which they come from, type of leadership provided by head teachers and parentage. The performance of science subjects has been poor compared to humanity subjects. Biology, Chemistry and Physics have been cited as the most poorly performed subjects and this has been a challenge to scholars, teachers and stakeholders at large. This has especially been as a result of the introduction of free primary education. However, the government of Kenya has undertaken a project in conjunction with the government of Japan through the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) called Strengthening Mathematics and Science in Secondary Education (SMASSE project, 2000). The programme provides in-service refresher training for teachers of Mathematics and Science where they are expected to use teaching aids in the classroom and engage learners in “hands-on” experiences in the course of teaching-learning process. The researcher has been teaching biology and chemistry in one of the schools in the district for close to one year and the results obtained in the examinations done by the students has been discouraging. The researcher has also been able to compare the MOCK results done in the district in May 2014 by form four students and they were not encouraging either. Due to the poor performance in sciences, the researcher has gained interest in investigating on the factors that contribute to the poor performance. The researcher will assume that there has been poor performance in science subjects compared to humanities in all schools. The research will be carried out in Naivasha District and out of 49 schools, 4 schools will be used to collect data from teachers and students .The researcher will develop research instruments which will be a mixture of open and close ended questionnaires for the respondents. The District Education Officers’ office will be used to collect secondary data including number of students, performance results in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in secondary schools. The study will target students who have been in school for more than two years. Therefore, the study will involve form 3 and 4 students. The respondents will be 160 students and 12 teachers in total. This is because each school will have 20 students from each class and 3 teachers from each school. One Focus Group Discussions will be carried out in each school.. The data collected will be analyzed through the use of SPSS and will be presented in form of frequency tables. The researcher believes that the research findings will provide the factors that contribute to the poor performance in science subjects