| dc.description.abstract | Guidance and counseling services have been introduced to Kenyan schools to address student behavior problems. However, the problems among students still persist. Head teachers have a great role of implementing the guidance and counseling services iri schools. The study investigated awareness and importance of guidance and counseling services in public primary schools in Kisii Central Sub-County, Kenya. The objectives of the present study were: to determine the level of creating awareness of guidance and counseling services among pupils in primary schools; to investigate the importance of guidance and counseling services to pupils in primary schools; to find out challenges encountered when providing guidance and counseling services to pupils in primary schools, and to establish the strategies applied to ensure there is effective guidance and counseling services to pupils in primary schools. The study was guided by behavioral theory by Skinner. Descriptive survey research design was used with qualitative element adopted. The target population comprised of 139 public primary schools with equivalent number of head teachers. Simple random sampling was used to select pupils and schools. Purposive sampling was used for head teachers and teacher counselors. A total sample of respondents was 140 whom included; 20 head-teachers, 40 teacher counselors and 80 pupils drawn from 20 primary schools. The instruments used were: questionnaires and interviews schedules. The questionnaires were used to solicit information from the teacher counselors and pupils' while the interview schedules were used to collect in depth information from the head teachers. In validating the instruments, the researcher requested four experts from the Department of Psychology and Education Foundation of the University to review the instruments in terms of the content coverage and face appropriateness. Reliability of the questionnaires was ensured through the use of split half method by Spearman Brown formula. The researcher concluded that the instruments were reliable, in that the reliability co-efficient of 0.818 was reported. Thematic analysis was used to analyze qualitative data while quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 22.The findings of this study revealed that; to have effective guidance and counseling program in schools, there was need for awareness seminars for the existence of service, to train more teacher counselors to cater for the large number of pupils, teacher counselors had heavy workload leading to lack of time for counseling, there was no room and material for guidance and counseling. The study recommended that, sensitization to be done to parents, train more teacher counselors, counselors relieved from workload, provide rooms and materials for guidance and counseling. | en_US |