Contextual Enablers and Hindrances of Girl Child Participation in STEM Education in a Kenyan County: A Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Kenya, student performance in sciences and Mathematics is still low compared to artoriented disciplines. The poor performance has affected not only the Girl child’s interest in these disciplines but also the number of girls that take STEM-oriented programs at tertiary levels. Several mitigating measures have been enacted although the situation has not changed much. This paper reports a study that explored contextual enablers and hindrances of Girl Child participation in STEM education in a Western Kenyan county. The study employed a case study approach by administering structured questionnaires, interview schedule and focused group discussion guide for data collection. The data were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods and revealed that: 1) lesson development that connected science concepts to activities in the local context motivated and improved girl child’s participation and performance in contextualized learning activities and 2), familiarity with the materials and tools used in planning and implementing contextualized learning activities evoked the girl child’s enthusiasm and courage to exchange knowledge and ask more curiosity focused questions. Also revealed were hindrances including: 1) teachers’ initial training that did not prepare them for this way of teaching and it was not and has not been modeled for them during their preservice education or the ongoing professional development workshops; and 2) the exam driven nature of the curriculum serving as a hindrance to teacher innovation and creativity in instructional techniques. The study recommends a more creative and innovative teacher training system and focused research to monitor girl child participation and performance in STEM education. Keywords: Contextualized learning; Girl Child, STEM education; performance
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".