last minute due ASAP sociology

Crystal Parker

4152432

American Military University

October 3, 2015

Grading rubric – critique of peer reviewed article

Crystal,

This seems to be an interesting article and you can use it as one of your sources, but it is not sociological. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to search within sociology to ensure that the perspective is relevant to class and to your major in sociology! I trust that you can find sociological sources around this topic if you try. Let me know if you would like further guidance on this. Watch out for citation errors/ include specific references with page numbers when you provide detail.

Thesis Statement: Divorce leaves scars on children’s mind and this is first observed in their academic performance. What’s the sociological aspect here? This sounds like psychology

I chose the paper “Impact of Divorce on Academic Performance of Senior Secondary Students in Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State” for the peer review assignment. Divorce impact children all over the world and my researches and sociologists and have tried to find out the different type of impact caused by divorce on children physical, emotional and mental well being. The following paper discusses the impact of divorce on academic performance of senior secondary students in Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State.

The paper is relevant to my topic and the reason for choosing this paper is that it is contradictory. ?While most of the researches believe that students of divorced parents often end up achieving low grades or do not perform well in class, this paper discusses that there is negative correlation between academic performance and marital status . It tries to establish the face that age and gender differences also do not play a significant role in judging the academic performance of students. It seems an eye opener and discusses many things about impact of divorce on children. But it suggests that it causes mental trauma to the students and which is evident in the behavior. At the end it discusses about some rehabilitative programs which I liked most.

The researcher utilized a survey method and some simple random sampling methods to study the impact. For this study about six senior secondary schools were selected, 20 students of divorced parents were chosen from each school making total 120 students as a subject sample. Different sets of questionnaire were designed and some tests were also conducted namely Students of Divorce Family Questionnaire (SDFQ), Academic performance test (EMT), English Language and Mathematics test. They expected to find a negative correlation between student of divorce and academic performance. Ok, specific references?

The main objective of the study was to find out the impact of divorce on academic performance of students, to find the age difference in students of divorce, to determine the gender differences in students of divorce (Akanbi,2014). The study was based on a survey method and focused on collecting all the relevant data related to divorce and academic performance of students 120 students of divorced parents out of 170 target population of students from divorced homes. Certain questionnaires were designed to judge the student’s academic performance. It was divided into two sections. Section A studied the demographics while Section B designed the questions to be studied on children. About 10 item questions were prepared for English language and mathematics. Around 126 copies of questionnaire were collected from six different schools for about 2-3 days. The collected data was analyzed using t-test and ANOVA. The different hypothesis designed is as follows.

Hypothesis 1: There is no significant relationship between student of divorce and academic performance.

Hypothesis 2: There is no significant age difference between students of divorce.

Hypothesis 3: There is no significant gender difference between student of divorce and academic performance based on gender. (Akanbi, 2014)

Independent and dependent variable were both noticed. Independent variable being the marital status of parents that is whether married happily or divorced and dependent variable being the academic performance of the students. Some of the key findings of the articles are that there is a negative correlation between students born of divorce parents and their academic performance. The findings suggest that divorce did not impact academic performance of students of divorced children. Also the hypothesis about the age and gender difference among students of divorce based on academic performance is rejected. But they find out that students of divorced parents experience emotional trauma that leads to less interaction with classmates as well as others. They prefer to stand time alone and sometimes they just choose one or two friends to talk to whom they trust. Girls and boys both find it difficult to cope with the academics as they face stress at home. They often day dream at school. They face struggle with their emotions. The authors drew the conclusion from the study and analysis that with the increasing divorce rates the students are at a high risk to suffer in their personal as well as academic life. They exhibit signs of depression and anxiety and lack the ability to concentrate in the class which reflects in the attendance and marksheet. Therefore the author suggests that the government should provide a rehabilitative program for the students belonging to the divorced families and also the school and school staff must give attention to the students who face more challenges in the school. ok

The major strengths of the article were that it discussed the literature review of the other research papers based on the same topic and also tried to find out the statistical analysis of the collected data. It also discussed some of the problems faced by students in the school that is lack of concentration, inability to communicate with other students and people in school. The only weakness I found in the article was that it studies the impact of divorce on academic performance of students only in Kwara State which I think limited the study. Also I think sample size would have been greater and also the data if compared with that of students of continuous marriage families the result would be different and more accurate.

References

Akanbi I M (2014). Impact of Divorce on Academic Performance of Senior Secondary Students in Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State. Research on humanities and Social Sciences. Vol 4 No 19, 2014. not APA; not a mainstream sociological journal