Abstract:
This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between principal leadership performance and students’ academic achievement in selected secondary schools of West Wollega Zone, Oromia Regional State. More specifically, the study deals with examining the level of principal leadership performance; finding out the significant relationship between principal leadership performance and students’ academic achievement; and investigating which sub-variable of principal’s leadership performance is strong prediction of student’s academic achievement. In order to attain the objectives of the study correlation research designs were used. As sources of data, 214 teachers and 18 school principals were selected by using simple random sampling and availability sampling techniques respectively. Questionnaire and interview were used to collect the required primary data from the respondents whereas result of students on grade 10 national examinations was used to measure students' academic achievement. Questionnaire was employed to collect data from teachers and interview was used to collect data from principals. The data collected from teachers using questionnaire were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics whereas the data collected from the principals using interview were analyzed by using thematic analysis method. The data collected from both sources were triangulated to increase the validity of the study findings. Additionally, in order to get the correlation between the two variables, data were entered into SPSS version 20 and the relationship between the two variables were executed by using Pearson product correlation moment coefficient. As per the analysis made, the researcher found out that the extent and status of principal leadership performance was moderately effective with grand mean score of 2.70. Particularly, they were weak in building school vision and goals, holding high performance expectations, providing individualized support, symbolizing professional practices and values, monitoring/modeling progress and fostering the acceptance of group goals. The finding of the level of student academic achievement was also moderately effective. Again, the findings of the study showed that there was high significance difference within principal’s leadership performance and within a student academic achievement. The findings of the relationship between principal’s leadership performance and student academic achievement were positively correlated with low significant. This implies that, students’ academic achievement could be determined by principal leadership performance. The regression analysis also shows that, the lower the correlation indicates the lower the prediction on student academic achievement. It is generally accepted that there was a weak relationship between school leadership and students' academic achievement. Then, based on major findings of the study it is concluded that, principals of the study area schools were deficient to play their respective principals’ leadership performance. Thus, the researcher recommended that the Woreda education offices are required to reverse challenges underlying principal leadership performance in students’ academic achievement by empowering current principals on the concepts of leadership; assigning principals qualified in Educational Leadership on merit basis; the school principals should focus on sharing, facilitating, and guiding decisions about instructional improvement for the enhancement of student’s academic achievement, and teachers are expected to improve teaching and learning strategies for better students’ academic achievement in order to alleviate problems identified as per the process of the entire study.