history

In my study it was observed that the body of form 6 students in St.George’s College comes from a wide range of households: matrifocal, nuclear, extended, and reconstituted and sibling. The most popular households were matrifocal and nuclear which both contained 33.33% or 1/3 of the students. This was followed by the extended household which contained 16.7%, then the reconstituted and sibling who accounted for only 8.34 % each. This therefore suggests that 66.66% or 2/3 of the entire sample comes from unstable homes. Of extreme significance, 1/2 of this ‘instability’ is open to consequences of matrifocailty. Therefore it can be assessed that matrifocality, according to obj. 2, is in fact a contributor to male academic underachievement to a large extent. Students were then allowed to assess their academic performance on a scale of either optimum achievement or underachievement. Only 41.67% believed that they had attained optimum achievement, thus placing St. George’s College in the Male Academic Underperformance category. Although all the boys did exceptionally well and 41.67% felt that they did not underperform, upon further examining, 83.34% in questions 15 and 16 of the questionnaire revealed that they could have performed better at their best performed subjects. According to my definition of underachievement which stated that “fit was failure to perform at their full capacity”, it can be emphatically stated that it is not 58.33%, but rather 83.34% of the boys who underachieved at CSEC. This is because students lacked a proper definition of male academic underachievement which thus resulted in the mal-assessment of themselves, or that some students were ironically in denial. Thus it answers obj. 1, indicating that the boys in St. George’s College is underachieving to a large extent. Based on the mentioned responses, the students were then asked to determine which factors they felt contributed to male academic underachievement. Here were both