Contribution of lesson preparations to the academic performance of evening class students: a case of Fibobe Primary School, Ndola, Zambia

The study sought to assess whether preparation of lessons by evening class teachers contributed to the academic performance of students in evening classes at Fibobe Primary School in Ndola, Zambia. The study was guided by the New Sociology of Education and the Constructivism theories. The study was a case study design and it employed qualitative approach to collect data. A sample size comprised 35 respondents that were disaggregated as follows; the coordinator, the head teacher, Education Standards Officer (ESO), 12 teachers who did not teach evening classes, 12 pupils in FGDs, 6 evening class teachers and 2 senior teachers, allselected through purposive sampling. Convenience sampling was used to select the school. Interview guide, Focus Group Discussion guide, observation checklist and document review were used in the collection of data. Data collected was analysed using thematic analysis. This involved coding of the data to generate the emerging themes. In order to strengthen data analysis, descriptive statistics was used by using percentages and frequency tables.
The major findings of the study revealed that evening class teachers did not prepare lessons in advance for teaching evening class students at Fibobe Primary School. It was also evident from the findings that lack of lesson preparation contributed significantly to poor academic performance of evening class students. Teachers did not prepare lesson plans, schemes of work and were using mostly one teaching method. The findings further revealed that lack of lesson preparation was exacerbated by lack of monitoring of teachers‘ lesson preparation. Though there were other factors such as absenteeism, lack of concentration by students due to fatigue and poor academic background of students, it was, however, concluded that the major contributing factor to poor academic performance of evening class students was lack of lesson preparation by evening class teachers.
The study thus recommended that: school administrators should monitor teachers‘ lesson preparations and those found wanting should be charged; the government, using expert lecturers in teaching methods, should organise seminars or in-service training to train evening class teachers how to teach adult learners and classes with few hours of learning; school administrators should allow evening class teachers and students to use teaching and learning materials so that evening class students could also benefit from these materials.