Teachers and Students worldwide often dance to the tune of tests and examinations. Assessments are powerful tools for catalyzing the achievement of educational goals, especially if done rightly. One of the tools for ‘doing it rightly’ is item analysis. The core objectives for this study, therefore, were: ascertaining the item difficulty and distractive indices of the university wide courses. A range of 112–1956 undergraduate students participated in this study. With the use of secondary data, the ex-post facto design was adopted for this project. In virtually all cases, majority of the items (ranging between 65% and 97% of the 70 items fielded in each course) did not meet psychometric standard in terms of difficulty and distractive indices and consequently needed to be moderated or deleted. Considering the importance of these courses, the need to apply item analyses when developing these tests was emphasized.
The impact of the interaction of governance and information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption on food security in West Africa is investigated in this study. The study engaged the system generalised method of moments (GMM) approach on a panel data of 15 West African countries. The data used for the study are obtained from the world development indicators (WDI) and world governance indicators (WGI), for the period 2005 to 2018. The findings show that good governance (government effectiveness and efficient anti-corruption control) can boost food security by between 12% and 20%. Furthermore, the findings show that a 1% rise in ICT adoption may boost food security by 12% to 15%. In explaining the level of food security, the relationship between governance and ICT adoption is positive and significant. This implies that ICT and governance (government effectiveness) interaction may have about 15% positive influence on food security, while ICT and control of corruption interaction may positively influence the level of food security by 8%. The study concludes by recommending that to enhance food security in West Africa, effectiveness in governance and ICT adoption are crucial.
BACKGROUND: This study examined the trends, determinants and health risks of adolescent fatherhood in three selected African countries where adolescent-girl pregnancy/motherhood are decried but with permissive male sexual latitude.METHODS: Adolescent male data were extracted from the malerecodedatasets of Demographic Health Survey (2000-2014) for Nigeria, Ethiopia and Zambia. The surveys were grouped into 3-Waves: (2000-2004); (2005-2008) and (2011-2014). The study employed descriptive and binary logistics that tested the log-odds of adolescent fatherhood with respect to selected sexual behaviour indices, and individual and shared demographic variables.RESULTS: The results revealed that the number of lifetimesexual-partners among the boys is ≥2. The likelihood of adolescent fatherhood is positively associated with increasing age at first cohabitation and multiple sexual partnerships (≥2) having OR=1.673 and OR=1.769 in 2005/2008 and 2011/2014 respectively. Adolescents who had attained tertiary education, and engaged in professional and skilled jobs were 0.313, 0.213 and 0.403 times (respectively) less likely to have ever-fathered a child. The positive association between rural place of residence and adolescent fatherhood in the past shifted to urban residents in 2011/2014.CONCLUSION: The study concludes that early sexual activities and cohabitation are common among male adolescents among the countries of study. The authors recommend discouragement of boy-girl cohabitation, increasing access to higher education and job opportunities in order to stem boy-fatherhood incidence in the study locations and, by extension, other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.KEYWORDS: Adolescent fatherhood, sexual behaviour, trends, determinants, health risks, lifetime-sexual-partners
Purpose: Nigeria is experiencing increased rate of drug use among young people. Studies have shown a very high rate of drug use and addiction among university undergraduates and this study was aimed at examining the experiences and meanings associated with drug abuse and addiction among university students while also identifying the causative factors of the use of psychoactive substances. Methods:The study which is a mixed method made use of an adapted and validated version of the drug abuse screening test (DAST-10) scale to measure drug use and emotional intelligence questionnaire was used to measure an aspect of psychosocial functioning and interviews were used to explore the subjective experiences of six participants. Both the purposive and snowballing sampling techniques were employed. The quantitative data generated were coded and entered into the statistical package for social sciences and results were presented using descriptive tables. Results:The results showed no significant relationship and a negative correlation between drug abuse and emotional intelligence (r = -0.229, p> 0.05). The qualitative data was transcribed and coded using thematic coding where themes are extracted from each transcript. The most commonly used substances were codeine (85%), alcohol (75%), cannabis (70%), tramadol (65%), rohypnol (65%), and tobacco (50%). Qualitative data shows that the participants exercised some sort of willpower over the use of psychoactive substances and the major reason for use was to seek a new experience. Conclusion:This study brought to the fore the evidence that personal meanings and experiences come into play in taking decisions on drinking or substance use and this should be considered when interventions are planned.
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