THE EFFECT OF LARGE CLASS SIZE IN THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN ENGLISH

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1      Background of the study

There was no earlier times improvement in the medical field and the paucity of medical personnel within human communities, (especially in the under developing nation of the world) did not make for enhanced health care. This led to the hampered human resource reproduction. The phenomenal decline in death rate over the last three to four decades was not accompanied by a similar decline in the birth rate and hence increase in population become the trend. This manifested itself in an impressive growth of the population size from one billion in the nineteenth century to about five billion in the first decade of nineteenth century.This population growth rate trend is in accordance with Sadips (1988) findings that everyday the world population increases by three hundred and seventy thousand (370,000) people while the united nations projection shows that the world population will be ten billion (10,000,000,000) in the year 2040. Africa is at the cross road of demographic explosion and unless the population trend is addressed and arrested in the new millennium, man is moving towards self distribution or population trap as predicted by rev. Thomas R. Mathus in 1798. Nigeria is the most populated country in the continent of Africa and the tenth in the world as shown by various post independence population census from 1963 to 2006.

This perhaps influence Sudan’s major general Joseph Lafus declaration that Nigeria is the basis for black Africa solidarity and as such she has great responsibility for being the most thickly populated and wealthy nation in the African Continent. The government of the day is afraid of universal problems associated with population explosion some of which are;

1.   Overpopulation leading to increase in class size in educational institutions.

2.   Overpopulation tending to over utilization of resources.

3.   Overpopulation giving rise to mass unemployment with associated criminal activity tendencies such as robbery, terrorism, kidnapping, prostitution, premarital sex etc.            

4.   Overpopulation affects the economy of a people.