Effect Of School Heads’ Transformational Leadership Practices On Students’ Academic Achievement In Public Senior High Schools In Kumasi Metropolitan, Ghana

ABSTRACT 

Transformational leadership practices have the capacity to deal with the leadership ills confronting secondary education in Ghana. The study sought to determine the effect of school heads’ idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and heads of schools’ individual consideration leadership practices on students’ academic achievement in public Senior High Schools (SHS) in Kumasi Metropolitan, Ghana. The study adopted the transformational leadership theory espoused by James McGregor Burns (1978) and supported by Bass (1985). The convergent parallel design, a mixed methods approach was engaged for this study. The target population was 17370, consisted of 19 heads of schools, 2122 teachers, and 15229 students. This study on the basis of Slovin’s sample calculation formula sampled 424 teachers and 552 students from the 19 schools selected. The study further employed Kothari’s proportional representation method to determine sample size for teachers and students for each school. The study used random sampling technique to sample students and teachers from the schools. Data were collected with questionnaire and interviews. Experts in Educational Management were requested to address the content validity of the data collection instruments for the study. Cronbach’s Alpha test indicated a value of 0.9, showing that the instruments were reliable. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data. In descriptive statistics, frequency, weighted average, standard deviation, and percentages were used. OLS regression analysis was employed to determine the effect of the independent variables on dependent variable. The study controlled for factors (sex of student, family structure of student, average age of teachers in a school, sex of teachers for a school, average educational attainment of teachers in a school, average teachers’ rank in a school, average number of years teachers have spent in a school) that could influence students’ academic achievement. Analyzed quantitative data were presented in tables. Qualitative data was analyzed thematically and analyzed data presented in narratives and in verbatim forms. The study used 5% significance level. The study found out that idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration had significant positive impact on students’ academic achievement. The leadership practice that had the highest regression value was inspirational motivation, which was 1.0. The study recommends that school heads should adopt transformational leadership practices to ensure improvement in students’ academic achievement.