Student Disruptive Behaviour and Stakeholders Mitigating Strategies in Cameroon Public Secondary Schools
Keywords:
Disruptive Behaviour, Stakeholder, Mitigating StrategiesAbstract
The general objective of this study was to find out the frequency of occurrence of the different forms of disruptive behaviour in Cameroon public secondary schools and to identify and describe the strategies that the different stakeholders can use to mitigate their occurrences. A sample of 4 Principals, 64 Discipline Masters/Mistresses, 121 Teachers and 2 Parents was drawn using purposive and random sampling techniques. Five research questions were answered using the mean scores and standard deviation of the questionnaire items, and two hypotheses were tested. The first hypothesis was tested using the student t-test developed by William Gosset, an Irish statistician, and the second hypothesis was tested using the qualitative data from interviews. A questionnaire of 24 items was developed and administered to 64 Discipline Masters/Mistresses, and 121 teachers while four Principals, and two Parents were interviewed with the help of interview guide. The null hypotheses for substance abuse, harassement, bulling and bulling were rejected because they were all lower than the significance level of 0.05 with 181 degrees of freedom proving that students of Cameroon Public Secondary Schools display cases of substance abuse, harassment, bullying, and nosiness in very high frequency in the other hand, the null hypothesis for truancy was retained because it was higher than the significance level of 0.05 with 181 degrees of freedom. The different stakeholders under study differ in their perception of strategies that could be used to mitigate student disruptive behaviours thus rejecting null hypothesis two. The results proves that the differences in the suggested strategies put forth by the different stakeholders, despite the fact that they are all in public secondary schools, are a result of the fact that they do not solely rely on the complimentary rules and regulations from the Ministry, but that each public secondary school comes up with their own internal rules and regulations as best sooth them. Some recommendations were made to the government, principals, discipline masters/mistresses, classroom teachers, parents, and students. One major recommendation was to encourage collaboration among the different stakeholders because they needed to work as a team so as to be able to eradicate disruptive behaviour in Cameroon public secondary schools. Another major recommendation was for the government to open training centers for principals so that they can learn how to manage both administrative duties and school personnel.
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