Factors Affecting Students’ Academic Performance: A Case of Public Secondary Schools in Ilala District, Dar es Salaam.

The study focused on the factors that affect the academic performance in secondary schools in Ilala district. The study was guided by the following research objectives: to relate how English capacity among the students affects the student academic performance, to relate the how the teaching and learning facilities such as (text books, chemicals facilities) and the students’ academic performance in secondary schools in Ilala District, and to establish how guidance and counseling affect academic performance of students in secondary schools. The study employed qualitative research design. Interview, focused group discussion and documentary were employed in data collection. The findings revealed that many learners could not master the English as (LOI), and they had very poor knowledge of vocabularies used in various subjects, they had weak English capacity to the extent of failing to make good and logical sentence in English. Altogether poor capability in English limited their ability to understand concepts in various discipline like Geography, Physics and Chemistry. Further, the results showed that with exception of arts textbooks, Science textbooks were not enough in Ilala Secondary Schools. This limited effective learning of various discipline like Physics. The funding further indicated that the schools were experiencing problems of science on one side and interaction during learning of the other side. Schools were observed to skip formative evaluation because of high costs of stationeries. Lastly, the results showed that many schools had no counselors to counsel teens. The finding further indicated that even if teens were pretending learning, they lost in between many hours for non academic activities like charting on email, smart phones and they had poor concentration in their studies. Recommendations to improve the academic performance are attached.