Influence of Principals Inspirational Motivation on Students Performance at Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in Public Secondary Schools, Kenya

There is widespread recognition that, education is the key to the well-being of any society. Therefore, this study was motivated by the need to improve students academic performance at Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations in Mbooni West Sub-county, Kenya. The study was guided by two objectives i. Examine the extent to which principals leadership practice of inspirational motivation (IM) in public secondary schools influences students performance at KCSE examinations. ii. Examine the extent to which principals demographic variables influence leadership practice of inspirational motivation in public secondary schools. The study targeted 42 public secondary schools in the Sub-county. A sample of 38 schools was selected using simple random technique whereby selections are made purely by chance. The study employed descriptive research design. Questionnaires, focus groups discussion, interviews guides, and document analyses were used to collect data. Data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. In descriptive statistics, frequencies, percentages, means, variance, and standard deviations were calculated and presented in tables. Pearsons Product Moment Correlation Coefficient was computed to test if relationships exist or does not exist between IM and students performance tested at alpha value 0.05 or 0.01 levels of significance. Further, t-test was used to determine whether principals demographic variables influence the leadership practices of inspirational motivation. The findings shown that, inspirational motivation has positive significant influence on students performance at KCSE examinations with.194** at alpha value 0.01 level (2-tailed). Further, results shown that, inspirational motivation is moderately practiced in public secondary schools. Besides, no significant influence found of principals demographic variables of gender and age on leadership practice of inspirational motivation. Future research should include larger sample sizes of principals and teachers from a variety of schools settings. Thus, investigate influence of principals transformational leadership practices (TLP) on teachers commitment in public secondary schools. This study recommends higher learning institutions to restructure comprehensive courses on TLP for teacher trainees to enhance establishment of effective schools leadership in Kenya.