I am strongly believe education is very important for everyone both boys and girls. The number of students that dropout is really high. But there are no recent research to figure out reasons why students dropout. This year I am doing the research about reasons why lower secondary high school students (grades 7-9) drop out of school in Siem Pang district, Steung Treng compared to Phnom Penh, 7 Makara district. Overall in Cambodia, in 2010, the dropout rate was higher for the lower secondary school (19.6%) than that of the primary school dropout, 8.7%, and upper secondary dropout rate is 11.8% (USAID From The American People). Phnom Penh has the lowest dropout (9.1 percent) and Banteay Meanchey has the highest rate (26.2 percent). I’m going to survey both parents and students that had drop out in one of the districts in Banteay Meanchey and Phnom Penh to compare the differences.
One challenge that I’m trying to overcome is to figure out ways I can find people that had dropout to interview. As you know we can’t find students and parents that dropout at school. They might go to other country. So some solutions I found are to interview those people during Khmer new year (this is the time people gather) and interview people at the factory (there are a lot of workers at the factory which didn’t require any education level).
Most of the time in class I worked on the statistic number of how many parents and students I could survey to make a valid data. Also, in order to convey a good survey is the wording of the questions. So most of the time I’m trying to figure out questions I should asks and how to ask the questions (the wording of the questions).