Abstract:
Students are acquiring attitudes within their classrooms, in their homes, among their peers and within the community of the individual students. The study focused on secondary school students attributes (such as gender, age, career goals, score in agriculture at primary is-bhool level, parents occupation and area of residence) related to their attitudes agriculture as a subject, as an elective and as a career goal of students within Migori district of Kenya. Success in the subject and decision by students to pursue agriculture and related courses at secondary and tertiary levels could be attributed to their personal attributes as enrolment in agriculture as a subject, as an elective and as a career goal in Migori district depends on positive attitudes cultivated amongst the students. It adopted a cross~sectional survey research design. The target population consisted of all the 3,000 form four students in Migori district who had made subject choices and had enrolled for Kenya National Examinations Council while the accessible population included the 1000 form fours in the six schools purposely selected for the study. Random sampling technique was used to select I00 form four students both taking and those not taking agriculture subject from both rural and urban district schools. A questionnaire whose reliability coefficient was 0.85 and which had both closed and open ended items was used to collect data. The data was processed and analyzed using descriptive statistics (means, frequencies, standard deviations, tables and charts) and inferential statistic (chi square test) to test the hypotheses. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 12 was used for the analyses. The study found out that the attitudes of secondary school students towards agriculture as a subject was generally low. The attitudes towards agriculture as an elective and as a career goal were moderate. It was concluded that there were no evidence to show that the student attitudes were related to their attributes studied, that is their gender, score in agriculture, area of residence and parents’ occupation were not related to their attitudes towards agriculture as a subject, as a career and as an elective. The study recommends that parents, teachers of agriculture, colleges and universities with programs which prepare professionals for agriculture-related careers to cooperate with secondary schools to provide information about a wide variety of agricultural careers and areas of study. They should also make visits to schools and produce high quality media which positively portray the wider range of opportunities of professional careers in agriculture and technologies.
