Holy Child College of Education

The study recognized the worth of understanding the how’s of handling censoring and censored data in survival analysis and the potential biases it might cause if researchers fail to identify and handle the concepts with utmost care. We systematically reviewed the concepts of censoring and how researchers have handled censored data and brought all the ideas under one umbrella. The review was done on articles written in the English language spanning from the late fifties to the present time. We googled through NCBI, PubMed, Google scholar and other websites and identified theories and publications on the research topic. Revelation was that censoring has the potential of biasing results and reducing the statistical power of analyses if not handled with the appropriate techniques it requires. We also found that, besides the four main approaches (complete‐data analysis method; imputation approach; dichotomizing the data; the likelihood‐based approach) to handling censored data, there were several other innovative approaches to handling censored data. These methods include censored network estimation; conditional mean imputation method; inverse probability of censoring weighting; maximum likelihood estimation; Buckley‐Janes least squares algorithm; simple multiple imputation strategy; filter algorithm; Bayesian framework; β ‐substitution method; search‐and‐score‐hill‐climbing algorithm and constraint‐based conditional independence algorithm; frequentist; Markov chain Monte Carlo for imputed data; quantile regression; random effects hierarchical Cox proportional hazards; Lin’s Concordance Correlation Coefficient; classical maximum likelihood estimate. We infer that the presence of incomplete information about subjects does not necessarily mean that such information must be discarded, rather they must be incorporated into the study for they might carry certain relevant information that holds the key to the understanding of the research. We anticipate that through this review, researchers will develop a deeper understanding of this concept in survival analysis and select the appropriate statistical procedures for such studies devoid of biases.

The focus of the study was to improve upon cooperative learning with the use of Jigsaw technique in Basic six of Holy Child Practice Primary School. Action research design was used in addition to a Case study design to conduct the study. The research instruments were observation and questionnaire. The researcher employed the Jigsaw technique as the intervention. The sample size used was 40, made up of 30 pupils and 10 teachers from the same institution. Responses gathered from both the observation and the administration of the instruments indicate that some of the causes of pupils poor performance in school were poor teaching methods during lessons and the inability of teachers to vary teaching techniques. It was observed during the research period that pupils had problems in actively participating in lessons. More so pupils did not know how to learn in groups. It also came to light that lack of understanding of collaborative and cooperative learning was the pupils’ deficiency. The study therefore empowered both teachers and pupils to resort to the use of collaborative learning due to its immense benefits.

International audience

International audience

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic brought distortions in the academic calendar of nations when educational institutions were closed. As a way of filling the gap created in the trend, tertiary institutions introduced online learning to support students’ learning while at home. There was also the need to introduce alternative learning approaches to students that will help them summarize and represent the lengthy lecture notes and reading materials into meaningful and memorable units. This study looks at the effectiveness of mind maps in promoting this home-based online learning. The participants were seventy-one (71) first-year Bachelor of Education students pursuing a 4-year degree program in Basic Education in Kibi Presbyterian College of Education. One group consists of students pursuing Home Economics as their major and the other primary education. A test and questionnaire were used to collect data. T-test was used to test the significance of the performance of the two groups, and multiple regression was used to find an association between the use of the strategy and students’ performance. The statistical software used for data analysis was IBM’s SPSS version 25. The result shows that the mind map strategy helped learners retain knowledge; however, students’ understanding of concepts was low

International audience

Knowledge of the content alone is no guarantee for effective teaching and learning, there is the need for teachers to demonstrate high level of technological and pedagogical power. The study examined the technological pedagogical content knowledge of Social Studies teachers’ in Junior High Schools in Aowin municipality in the Western North Region of Ghana. The descriptive survey design was used for the study. The population for the study included all Social Studies teachers in the public Junior High Schools in the Aowin Municipality. Simple random and purposive sampling techniques were used to select the Seventy-four (74) Junior High Schools and Seventy-four (74) the Social Studies teachers for the study. The main instrument for data collection was questionnaire. The study revealed that, teachers have adequate content knowledge to teach Social Studies but there are doubts as to whether their knowledge is current. The study also concluded that, teachers were not confident about their technological, pedagogical and content knowledge in Social Studies and this resulted in their negative attitude towards the integration of technology in classroom activities. It is recommended that, the Ghana Education Service should organize In-Service Training and refresher courses for teachers to keep them current and up-to-date their content knowledge in Social Studies. It is also recommended that, teachers should adopt positive attitudes towards learning and using technology in their day-to-day activities.

The youth is said to be the backbone of every society because of the critical role they play in the community development. The youth, therefore, form the pivot of societal development. This paper assessed the role of youth groups in the community development in Akyode Traditional Area in the Nkwanta South Municipality. The research adopted a mixed-method approach, specifically concurrent triangulation where the researchers employed both the quantitative and qualitative approaches to study a phenomenon at the same time. The simple random sampling technique was employed to select 200 respondents for the study. It was realized that the youth groups play diverse roles including sensitizing members on the importance of education and initiating community development projects. It was also realised that there is a positive relationship between youth development and their role in the community development processes in the area. The study recommends that the competences, attitudes, values and skills of the youth could be further developed through symposia, club meetings, workshops, conferences, seminars and sports and games to enable them to contribute meaningfully towards community development.

International audience

Purpose: This study seeks to examine the causes of falling educational standards of religious and moral education subjects in the Mfantseman District in Ghana and to draw the attention of all stakeholders to the poor academic performance of students in religious and moral education.
 Design/Methodology/Approach: The study employs the case study method, which was informed by a qualitative research design approach. A Purposive sampling technique was chosen to select 43 participants. The data collection method that was used in this study was a semi-structured interview guide. Thematic analysis was applied manually to the data. 
 Findings: RME education was influenced by religious and cultural biases, leading to a lack of diversity, tolerance, and respect for different religious and cultural values and beliefs.
 It was revealed from the study that teachers lack the autonomy to develop their teaching methods and strategies, leading to a lack of innovation and creativity in RME education.
 Again, it was established that many RME teachers did not receive adequate training to teach the subject effectively, leading to poor teaching practices and low student engagement.
 Research Limitation/Implication: The study focuses on the falling educational standard of religious and moral education. The study concentrated on some selected communities in the Mfantseman District.
 Practical Implications: Develop strategies to address the factors that contribute to the decline in the quality of RME education, such as inadequate teacher training, outdated curriculum, and insufficient resources.
 Social Implications: This requires a coordinated effort among policymakers, educators, religious organisations, and other stakeholders to address the challenges facing RME education and promote the development of effective strategies that can improve the quality of RME education and promote social development and harmony.

The passage of National Health Insurance Scheme to replace the old system (called cash and carry) in Ghana seems to have raised many questions as to whether it has increased the rate at which people attend hospital and abolished cash and carry system. The data collected were hospital attendance for both health insurance and cash and carry system on monthly basis across age groups and gender for 2008-2017, obtained from Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. Chi-Square tests and the Box-Jenkins’s methodology of time series analysis were employed to analyse the data. From the findings, the autocorrelation function (ACF) and partial autocorrelation function (PACF) plot suggested an AR process with order 1. Candidate models were obtained using the minimum AIC criteria to select adequate models and appropriate models were obtained as SARIMA (1,0,0) (0,1,0)₁₂ model for insured (NHIS) and SARIMA (1,1,1) (2,0,1)₁₂ model for uninsured (Cash and Carry system). Model diagnostics tests were performed using Ljung-Box test. The Chi-square tests inferred dependence in hospital attendance between insured and non-insured patients on gender and the years, In conclusion, insured patients will be increasing throughout the age groups and non-insured patients will be increasing for specific age groups 0-28 days to 15-17 years for the next 24 months. This research recommended among others that education should be given to the general public about the importance of health insurance, it registration and operations especially age group 0-28days to 15-17 years because they seem to continue the use of Cash and Carry System in seeking healthcare regardless of the introduction of NHIS.

Further Mathematics is frequently perceived as a subject set aside for some exceptional individuals. It often induces feelings of worry; nervousness and panic among students. This study employed the survey research design aimed at investigating difficult concepts in senior secondary school further mathematics curriculum as perceived by students in Archbishop Porter Girls' Senior High School in Ghana. The study was guided by two research questions and the sample for the study was 100, all of who were females. The instrument used for the collection of data was a 37-item questionnaire tagged Difficult Concept Identification Questionnaire in Further Mathematics (DCIQFM). The data obtained were analyzed using Mann Whitney's U test average rank values for determining difficult concepts and perceived causes of further mathematics. Cronbach's Coefficient Alpha was used to estimate the reliability of the study which was found to be 0.754. The findings revealed Conic Section as the most perceived difficult concept in the further mathematics curriculum in Ghana. Other perceived difficult topics were Binomial Theorem, Sequence and Series, Calculus, Trigonometry and Combination (and permutation and their applications). Again, large class size was identified as the main cause of the perceived difficulty sense students have towards further mathematics. Non-science students perceived further mathematics concepts as more

To many, the emergence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has done more harm than good to the youth particularly adolescent students. Hence, this study sought to investigate the influence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on the academic achievement of students of Holy Child Senior High School in Cape Coast. It specifically examined how ICT improves the academic achievement of students, other uses to which students put ICT/internet facility, its effects on their moral behaviour, and how it can be regulated among students. It also tested relationship between the students’ use of computer and their academic performance at 5% significance level. The study design was the Mixed Method Research type with a population consisting of 70 teachers, 1010 students, their parents and internet café operators in the Metropolis. A sample size of 300 was determined for the study comprising 200 students, 50 teachers and 45 parents randomly selected, while five internet café operators in the Metropolis were purposively chosen. The study recorded a 91.3% retrieval rate. Questionnaires and interview schedules were designed to solicit information from the respondents. The SPSS was used to analysis the data gathered. The study confirms that ICT/internet has a positive influence on the academic performance of students. It is recommended that students should be allowed and encouraged to use ICT/internet strictly for only academic purposes.

This study examined the non-medical factors that influence expectant mothers to opt for caesarean deliveries in Ghana. Data on 395 expectant mothers across the ten regions of Ghana who were located in urban, semi-rural and rural areas, and spanned a period of five years (from 2012 to 2016) were obtained from the Ghana Health Service. In fitting the logistic regression model, data on 355 expectant mothers (i.e. 89.9% of the data) was assigned to the analysis sample while 40 (i.e. 10.1%) was assigned to the hold-out sample. The hold-out sample together with other statistical measures of overall model fit, pseudo R2 measures and classification accuracy were used to validate the results obtained from the analysis sample. Significance was tested at p = 0.05. Determinants including, educational level of expectant mother, parity of expectant mother, baby’s birth weight, previous caesarean delivery, location of expectant mother, age of expectant mother and, period within the year of childbirth had a significant effect on caesarean delivery. The study recommended that health practitioners should be able to foretell expectant mothers who are likely to undergo caesarean delivery in order for them to prepare financially and psychologically to avoid further complications. Due to the significant positive attitude of women towards caesarean delivery rather than normal delivery, it is necessary to inform them about the advantages of normal delivery and the health hazards associated with caesarean delivery to the mother and child.

Age is a very important variable that guides clinicians to carryout diagnosis, treatment, as well as administering medical procedures to patients. Misreporting of age by patients to clinicians can have dire consequences on the patients’ health. This retrospective study used a 10 year demographic data involving the ages reported by 906,383 patients. Demographic indexes such as Whipples, Myers Blended and Joint Score were employed to analyse reported ages among insured and uninsured patients at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. The computed joint score values of 76.88 and 85.60 respectively for uninsured and insured patients qualified the data as highly inaccurate by the standards of interpretation of UN index. The summary of the digit preference of the uninsured and insured patients by Myers blended index approach were 29.34 and 29.87 respectively. The blended sum at the digits 0, 1, 2 and 5 exceeded 10% of the total blended population, an indication of over selection of ages ending in those digits by the insured and uninsured patients. Whipple’s index for uninsured and insured patients was 149.3 and 287.1 respectively. These values respectively show that the reliability of the ages reported were rough and very rough, by the Whipple’s index interpretation standards. The insured were found to have higher tendency of concentrating on ages ending in 0 and 5 than the uninsured. The study concluded that age data in Cape Coast Teaching Hospital is misreported and inaccurate and if not adjusted may result in wrong age-dependent medical procedures undertaken by clinicians. It was recommended among others for hospitals to institute innovative ways of recording ages such as using calendar of historical events technique where the patients could not recall their correct age.

Child labour is one of the contemporary issues that has attracted the attention of many researchers. Most school children all over the world are engaged in child labour. This research investigates the effects of child labour on children academic activities in the Krachi East District in Ghana. The research adopted the mixed method. The purposive and snow ball sampling technique were used to select one hundred and sixty (160) victims of child labour. The questionnaire was the main instrument used for data collection. The questionnaire was edited by experts in child labour and this helped to achieve validity. Data were analysed using tables and figures. It was realized that 68.7% of the children were engaged in agricultural activities and the major reasons for their plight include large household size, parental illiteracy and poverty. Child labour leads to low academic performance. The study recommends that government should support children from poor homes.

The paper sought to model the relationship between GDP and 29 macroeconomic variables in Ghana using the Principal Component Analysis and multiple linear regression. Economic data with 583 data points were collected from January, 1990 through to May, 2018. The KMO statistics was 0.750 and the Bartlett's Test of sphericity statistic obtained for the data was 24807.231 of p-value 0.000. The variables were found to be powerfully correlated with reference to the correlation matrix. Principal Component Analysis was performed to reduce the factors (using orthogonal varimax technique to produce uncorrelated factor structures to help allocate appropriately loadings to factors) to a minimum without compromising the variability of the original data. Seven factors were retained (explained 74% of the overall variation) after using multiple extraction approaches of Scree test, Kaiser Criterion and parallel analysis to avoid over- and under-extraction errors. Regression analysis was performed where component scores were used to develop a relationship with the uncorrelated components and GDP. The component 2 (Closed Economy without Government Activities) explicitly contained seven indicators consisting of consumer price index-Food, Consumer price index-Nonfood, Consumer Price index (overall), Monetary Policy Rate, 91-Days Treasury Bill, 182-Days Treasury Bill, crude oil, and Core Inflation (Adjusted for Energy and Utility). Component 2 was significant and positively related with GDP (B = 0.6, p<0.01). Again, Component 5 (Closed Economy with Government activities) explicitly contained two indicators such as Tax-Equivalent Rate on 28-Days Treasury Bill and Tax-Equivalent Rate on 56-DaysTreasury Bill. Component 5 had a positive and significant impact on GDP (B = 0.386, p<0.01). However, component 4 (monetary economy; B = -3.927, p<0.01), component 6 (B = -0.577, p<0.01) and component 7 (B = -0.256, p<0.01) were negatively related with GDP but were statistically significant. The R-squared value of 0.304 shows that the regression model explains about 30% of the variance. It was recommended for future researchers to consider increasing the number of macroeconomic variables to increase the predictive power of the model.

This study applies life table functions and survival analysis to determine school life expectancy in Ghanaian private and public Basic Schools from grade 1 to grade 9 (JHS 3). The Kaplan Meier statistics such as Log Rank (Mantel-Cox), Breslow (Generalized Wilcoxon), and Tarone-Ware tests consistently showed a statistically significant difference between the male and female school dropout rate for private school pupils but showed statistically insignificant difference between male and female pupils’ dropout rate in public school pupils. The school life expectancy of grade 1 pupil in private and public schools were respectively found to be approximately 7 years for female and 8years for male; clearly showing that a grade one pupil in a private or public school who is a female has lower school life expectancy than the male counterparts. The survival curves for both private and public school cohorts showed that male pupils generally performed better than female counterparts. The survival curves and life table methods all established that peak dropout among male and female pupils generally occurred between grades 6 and 8 inclusive. It was also evident that average school life expectancy decreases with increasing age (i. e. with increasing grade levels). The study recommended further research to explore the effect of adolescent stage on the girl child education.

Caesarian Section (CS) rates have been known to have geographical varaitions. The purpose of this paper was to determine Ghana’s situation (regional trend) and also to provide a two- year forcast estimates for the ten (10) regions of Ghana. The data was longitudinal and comprised monthly CS records of women from 2008 to 2017. The dataset was divided into training and testing dataset. A total of eighty four (84) months were used as the training dataset and the remaining thirty six (36) months were used as testing dataset. The ARIMA methodology was applied in the analysis. Augmented Dicker-Fuller (ADF), KPSS and the Philips-Perron (PP) unit root tests were employed to test for stationarity of the series plot. KPSS (which is known to give more robust results) and PP test consistently showed that the series was stationary (<i>p</i> ＜ 0.05) for all ten (10) regions, although there were some conflicting results with the ADF test for some regions. Tentative models were formulated for each region and the model with the lowest AIC was selected as the “Best” model fit for respective regions of Ghana. The “best” Model fit for Greater Accra, Central and Eastern regions were respectively SARIMA (2, 0, 0) (0, 1, 1)₁₂, SARIMA (2, 0, 0) (0, 1, 1)₁₂ with a Drift and SARIMA (1, 1, 1) (0, 1, 1)₁₂. Additionally, the best model fit for Northern and Volta regions were SARIMA (3,0,2) (0,1,1)₁₂ with drift and SARIMA (0,1,1) (0,1,1)₁₂. Ashanti, Upper East and Western regions failed the JB test or the normality test for the residuals. Upper West and Brong Ahafo Regions were not suitable for forecasting due failure to depict white noise and ARCH test failure, respectively. The best models fit were used to forecast for 2019 and 2020. The results showed that regional variations of CS exist in Ghana. The study recommended for future studies to apply methods that will allow for forecasting for regions which failed the test under the methods used in this study.

This study sought to find out the state of the structures of quality assurance practices in Colleges of Education in Ghana. It specifically explored the sociological variables and the challenges associated with ensuring quality assurance practices in the management of the Colleges of Education. The design for the research was non experimental descriptive survey and data were gathered through the use of questionnaires. There were 3 sets of questionnaires one for each group namely principals, tutors and students of five colleges of education. Each of the questionnaires were validated and their reliability tested with a Cronbach’s co efficient alpha of 0.829 for the students and 0.914 for the tutors. The results were an indication of good reliability estimate. In all, 5 principals, 180 tutors and 1,153 students were given the questionnaires. Findings from the study suggested that students admitted to the Colleges enter with poor grades. The libraries are also not well-equipped for students and tutors to support quality teaching and learning. The study also found out that the professional experience of tutors in the Colleges was excellent. Based on the findings, it is recommended that, firstly, admissions should be based on the Ghana Tertiary Education (GTEC) requirements for tertiary institutions. Secondly, principals should be encouraged to attend institutional management courses to improve upon their management styles. Thirdly, adequate financial resources should be allocated to the Library so that current books, journals and reference books can be purchased to improve teaching and learning. Fourthly, quality assurance units should be established in the Colleges to ensure quality.