EATING HABIT AS A DETERMINANT OF ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN IKENNE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

Our focus in this chapter is to critically examine relevant literature that would assist in explaining the research problem and furthermore recognize the efforts of scholars who had previously contributed immensely to similar research. The chapter intends to deepen the understanding of the study and close the perceived gaps.

Precisely, the chapter will be considered in three sub-headings:

• Conceptual Framework
• Theoretical Framework

2.1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Concept Of Eating Habit

The term eating habit describes the reason and how people eat, which foods they eat, and with whom they eat, as well as the ways they obtain, use, store, or discard food. A common eating pattern is the three meals per day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) with snacks between meals(Diet, 2016). Eating a healthy diet helps the brain by providing the vitamins and minerals needed to function well. Good eating habit not only promotes physical wellbeing but academic health as well(Naillon, 2007). Erickson (2006) submits that skipping breakfast drains energy and increases snaking rate while Fitday (2016) identified various injurious eating habits as food binging which is eating a large amount of food in one sitting mainly because a meal was skipped and try to compensate for it; motional eating driven by some amount of emotions to eat even when not hungry; eating during other activities like eating during reading time and eating late at night and eating before going to bed. Paula (2016) identified the long term effects of bad eating habits as regularly eating at night, consuming a lot of fast food, skipping breakfast, eating oversized portions and drinking sugary beverages. All these can contribute to weight gain that can eventually lead to obesity putting a lot of health risk on a person(Paula, 2016). Food habits are among the most deeply ingrained forms of human behaviour. Sharing food in the sociable setting of the meal is not only enjoyable but also has fundamental symbolism for the solidarity of families and the reproduction of relationships. Douglas (1972) noted a symbolic threshold between food and drinks: ‘Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honored guests...Those we only know at drinks we know less intimately.’ Table manners, the ritualized forms of behaviour that regulate these occasions, are usually first inculcated in childhood at the family table. The Victorians decreed that children were to be ‘seen but not heard’ at dinner, and for them ‘every meal is a lesson learned’ (Visser 1991, 48). There are also wider social norms that come under the heading of taken-forgranted practices. None of Warde and Martens' (1998,) interviewees, for instance, ate roast beef with custard, because of ‘internalized constraints which effectively prohibit people from such courses of action on pain of embarrassment of being considered socially deplorable or grossly incompetent’. Nor, one supposes, did they engage in cannibalism, because of an even deeper-rooted taboo that predates organized religion and which now embraces most of the world’s cultures. Food is the focus of many of our festivals, both the regularly occurring events such as those in the religious calendar, and occasional events, such as weddings and funerals. Special foods may be served, often rich in ingredients, complex in preparation, and usually generous in quantity. The occasion may only be annual, as with the roast turkey, mince pies, cake and pudding of the British celebration of Christmas, but the significance is well-known to all, including those outposts of British culture where the feast may be consumed on a hot beach rather than in the depths of winter. Even more frequent than ‘meals’ are the so-called ‘food events’ or snacks that are becoming an essential part of modern life. Teenage grazing is a popular stereotype but it seems to have some substance in reality to be believed. Here we see the establishment of a pattern of adolescent eating where only 58.4 per cent of an American sample were eating three ‘square meals’ a day. One interesting finding of recent research is that consumers of snack or ‘junk’ food are well aware of the health consequences of eating items high in fat, sugar and salt, but they find the pull of the associated lifestyle irresistible, especially the teenagers who can thereby demonstrate their peer group loyalty and their independence of parental influence. Time-honoured food habits and meal patterns are said to be dissolving under the pressure of modern life. On the one hand, time has become such a constraint for busy people that the leisured cooking of complex recipes is now less of an option than it was only a few decades ago, and meals of a predictable composition served at set times have also declined. On the other hand, there have been powerful shifts in family structure, with the growth in single person households undermining traditional collective meals. For some this is a liberating experience, but Fischler (1980) has described this new era as one of ‘gastro-anomy’, echoing Durkheim’s concept of ‘anomie’ (normlessness). Dickinson and Leader (1998) report one survey that found that two-thirds of evening meals in Britain are now consumed in front of the television. It seems that both the family and the family meal are under threat. However, most food cultures still recognize the continued importance of the group sharing of food. Murcott (1997) reports evidence from the U.K. and Germany that family meals remain the norm. The idea of a ‘proper’ meal is particularly strong. This is a reflection of core values and beliefs, some of which may have religious overtones. The components of a meal are usually a core item of animal protein (meat or fish), a staple of plant origin (potato, rice, maize), vegetable trimmings, and a dressing of sauce or gravy, but there are are almost infinite variations on this theme. Mintz (1996) identifies a primitive grammar of the meal that he calls CFL, comprised of a core item (such a rice), a fringe item (such as a sauce), and a legume. With industrialization this has changed to M+S+2V, meat plus a staple (such as potatoes), plus two vegetables. Mary Douglas and her collaborators codified the structure of British working class meals and found that certain strong themes have survived. First, they classified four forms of eating, and then three types of meal were identified. This structural approach has been influential and has been widely applied (Table 22.4). In South Wales, Murcott (1982, 1983) found that the ideal cooked dinner comprised meat, potatoes and vegetables, with some elaborations at the weekend and at Christmas. The housewife, however, rarely has autonomy in the choice of ingredients, her role as ‘gatekeeper’ being constrained by patriarchal authority and by the ‘choosiness’ of children.

Different forms of eating

1. Meal: a structured event, a social occasion when food is eaten according to rules concerning time, place and sequence of actions.
2. Snack: unstructured food event without rules of combination and sequence.

Types of meal

• A major meal or the main meal. The first course is based on a staple (potato), a centre (meat, fish or egg), vegetables and dressing (eg. gravy). The second course is sweet.
• A minor or secondary meal, eg breakfast. C. Less significant meal, eg tea and biscuits.

Food Choice And Food Preferences

Neophobia is a dislike of the new, and in the case of food this may be manifested in its taste, odour and appearance. Young children are especially prone to the rejection of food for this reason but adults may also refuse novel foods or dishes that seem to lie beyond the limits of their socially-constructed taste. The social context of such tastes is extremely complex and we have evidence that it may sometimes have historical origins which go back for several thousand years. An example is our attitude to cattle, beef and milk. There was a deeply ingrained religious reverence for cattle in many neolithic cultures, from the Mediterranean to India, no doubt arising from their status as one of the first forms of moveable wealth (Harris 1987). Bull-reverence in the cult of Mithras actually challenged Christianity for popularity at one point in the Roman Empire, and it is no surprise that the early Church adopted a description of the Devil as having horns and cloven feet. There are a few remnants of bovine rituals, such as the bull-fighting and bull-running in Spain and Portugal, but the religious aspect is preserved most prominently in the Hindu worship of cattle. In the nineteenth century cattle later represented a convenient and reliable means of opening up the frontier of the expanding United States on the western range, which makes up over forty per cent of that country’s present land surface. They are now performing a similar function in what Rifkin (1992) calls the ‘cattlization’ of the Latin American jungles. Our tastes have therefore been primed for the consumption of meat by an ancient respect for cattle, and also by geopolitical forces which have resulted in the availability of cheap livestock products through international trade. The latter has been facilitated and encouraged by the emergence of a global cattle complex underpinned by transnational corporate capital. Some writers have gone as far as to identify the emergence of a ‘world steer’, whose meat is marketable worldwide, but the comparison was with the ‘world car’ and it is not possible to confirm the same level of organization and integration in the two industries.

Nick Fiddes (1991) rather sees meat consumption as having been symbolic of the human domination of nature. The rise of vegetarianism and the decline in particular of red meat sales are related to health issues and animal welfare, but they may also indicate a more fundamental shift in society’s relationship with the environment and with the animal world (Chapter 18). In that sense we may well be living at one of the key hinge points in the history of human diet and thinking about the acceptable origins of food.

Concept Of Academic Performance

Academic performance according to the Cambridge University Reporter (2003) is frequently defined in terms of examination performance. Academic performance is often characterized by performance in tests, in course work and performance in examinations of undergraduate students. According to Busari (2000) academic performance is also broad name for academic achievement and is generally regarded as the display of knowledge attained or skills developed in the school subject. Iregbu (1992) stated that academic performance is the level of performance in school subject as exhibited by an individual. Alkhutaba (2013) posit that in the school setting, academic performance is referred to as the exhibition of knowledge attained or skills developed in school subject. In the university, the student academic performance is measured through several ways like CGPA, GPA and their test result. Universities use GPA to measure student performance in particular semester. However, Geiser and Santelices (2007) and Acato (2006) reported that academic performance is affected by a number of factors including admission points, social economic status and school background. Swart (1999) in his earlier research pointed out that admission points or university entrance examination score are a reflection of the previous performance which no doubt influence future academic performance. These views tend to portray that academic performance to a large extent emanate from the socio economic background of the student.

Factors That Contribute To Pupils Academic Performance

Parents’ Education

The parents of a kid are his or her closest relatives. Parents who are more educated have a better knowledge of their children's educational needs and skills. As a consequence, parents help their children with their early education, which has an influence on their knowledge and competency in their domains. Parents' educational and intellectual backgrounds have a big influence on their children's academic life.

According to Grissmer (2017), parents' educational attainment has the largest influence on their children's academic achievement. Children's academic performance is impacted by their parents' educational status, according to Taiwo (2016). He says that this is because parents would be in a great position to act as second teachers to their children, coaching and counseling them on how to perform well in school and giving them with the necessary tools.

According to Musgrave (2017), children who grow up in an educated family desire to follow in their parents' footsteps and are more involved in their academics as a consequence. According to Jeynes, a child from a well-educated family with a high socioeconomic status is also more likely to succeed than a child from an illiterate family (2017). This, he believes, is due to the perception that children from educated households get a lot of help, such as an acceptable and outstanding environment for academic work, parental support and supervision, appropriate textual and intellectual resources, and adequate nourishment. Children with parents with high educational, occupational, and social standing have a considerably greater probability of getting into top secondary schools and ultimately into the finest colleges and institutions in practically all nations, according to Eamon (2018). In truth, rather than color, ethnicity, or immigrant status, the most important factor impacting children's educational achievement is their parents' education (Considine & Zappala, 2015).

Academic Ambition of the Child

Dembo (2017) was the one who first introduced and stated the need of setting behavior goals. Educators could describe a student's academic drive as their ability to set and attain goals (Dembo, 2017).

Ambition, according to Pettigrove (2007), is the continuous and widespread desire for achievement, attainment, and accomplishment. Ambitions are connected to the pursuit of achievement and the avoidance of failure, according to Dembo , lewin, Festinger, and Sears (2017). In a nutshell, ambition is about attaining rather than accomplishing, however the two terms are often used interchangeably (Maurin, 2016). Many philosophers have debated the virtues of ambition, with those who believe it is noble seeming to outweigh those who believe it is bad (Pettigrove, 2017). Students who establish demanding objectives for themselves are more task-oriented and have a greater feeling of purpose in their life. Students' learning, life preparation, academic motivation, and achievement may all be influenced by academic desire.

Quaglia and Cobb (1996) describe academic ambitions as "a student's aptitude to understand and develop future aims while being motivated to work toward those goals in the present." As a result, ambition denotes the notion that a certain action is important in achieving long-term objectives. It reflects people's convictions that thinking about and preparing for the future is both possible and desirable (Quaglia & Cobb, 2018).

Individual goals are important because they may influence important actions and outcomes, such as educational performance (Goodman & Gregg, 2016). Numerous studies have shown that young people who have greater educational aspirations are more driven and attain higher educational levels than their peers. Without a doubt, the relationship between educational outcomes and academic objectives seems to be complex. As a result, ambition may be both a predictor and a consequence of educational achievement, and it is influenced by self-efficacy, personal qualities, experiences, mediating family factors, and views about ability.

Effort of the Child

Without a doubt, a lot of key components contribute to students' academic performance, the most significant of which is labor (Tella & Tella, 2017). Persistence, also known as effort management or effort control, refers to the continued investment of energy in learning despite obstacles.

According to Carbonaro (2015), school effort refers to the amount of time and effort pupils put in to meet the official academic criteria set out by their teachers and/or school. He identified three types of school effort: rule-oriented effort (showing up and behaving in class), procedural effort (completing assignments on time), and intellectual effort (completing projects on time) (critically thinking about and understanding the curriculum). When students attribute their academic performance to effort/perseverance or get feedback that relates their success to effort, they build stronger self-efficacy and expectations for future skill improvement. Several studies have looked at the influence of effort and tenacity on students' academic achievement while establishing success goals (Opare & Dramanu, 2002). According to studies, effort has a role in determining academic success outcomes. In reality, studies demonstrate that effort is positively associated to academic success (Opare & Dramanu, 2015). Among all general approaches, it is discovered that effort is the only direct predictor of learning outcomes.

Study Habits:

Because a student's grades may be connected to their study habits, their study habits may be helpful in predicting grades. Students who have poor study habits, on the other hand, may get worse grades than those who have outstanding study habits. Study abilities and learning approaches include time management, accessing information resources, taking class notes, engaging with instructors, preparing for and taking examinations, and many more. There is a clear correlation between such learning practices and methodologies and academic achievement in higher education, according to the data. Students who create their own study aids spend more time doing so than students who depend on the study aids of others. It's also likely that, like taking notes, creating study aids supports the learner in learning more meaningful knowledge by combining diverse pieces of information into new knowledge. We wondered whether students who used pre-made study aids instead of generating their own missed out on the benefits of time-on-task and concept mapping.

Maurin (2015) developed a study habits questionnaire for high school and college students. Their study abilities index looked at three characteristics in both homework and test situations. Distractibility items evaluate the extent to which students report being unable to maintain their attention or concentrate on their task. How well students try to grasp the thing they're studying—do they look for essential concepts or deeper meaning—is a good indicator of their inquisitiveness. Compulsiveness questions assess how attentive pupils are to details and how hard they try to remember knowledge.

Learning Skills:

Student behavior and learning, according to current research, are important factors of academic achievement and retention. If we wish to increase students' academic performance in higher education institutions, we need to focus on interventions that target learning mechanisms, according to Harris, et al. (2017), indicating the need for such programs to be implemented. Despite its theoretical importance and widespread coverage in international media, the influence of learning techniques on academic achievement has gotten much less attention.

Greater time spent on learning activities leads to more learning, according to Jere Brophy in 1998, as long as the teacher is competent and the learning activities are well-designed and conducted. Another concept that affected us was concept mapping. A strategy in which the learner relates new knowledge to a framework of previously taught concepts is known as concept mapping. According to Maurin(2015), the connection of new and old knowledge is a critical component of successful learning and the difference between meaningful and rote learning.

Food And The Body

From Foucault to the postmodernists, there has been much writing in recent years on the body as a locus of social discipline, as an arena of risk and health, as raw material for the politics of agency/self, and as a focus of identity creation. We do not have the space here to cover any of these topics in depth, but let us consider one interesting aspect: dieting and eating disorders in the creation of body image. Although more men are obese, it is mostly women and girls who diet. In the twentieth century, regulating body weight became an essential element of modern femininity. A significant pressure upon the bodily self-image has been the undoubted power of the advertising industry, and the media generally, to project an ideal of thinness, as shown particularly by fashion models. As Germov and Williams (1996) remind us, these models are representative only of the thinnest 5-10 per cent of the population, but their look has become normalized to the extent that millions of women believe that they themselves are ‘abnormal’. The vast majority of women feel this pressure and at various times restrict their diet and monitor their weight. According to Mintz (1996), they do so ‘to make themselves members of a gender-defined group of abnegators, self-defining and self-fulfilling’. Feminists argue rather that it is the values of patriarchal society which impose a body image upon women and, therefore, the problem is not insoluble, given that they have greater power over their own lives than in the past. According to the Body Mass Index (weight in kg divided by height in metres squared), a desirable status is 20-25, overweight 25-30, and obesity >30. Recent data suggests that obesity among women in the U.K. has risen to 20 per cent of women and 17 per cent of men in 1999, compared with 36 and 31 per cent in the U.S.A.. In the latter country, 52 per cent of women have a self-image of being overweight, and 64 per cent of those with a B.M.I. of below 25 have dieted at some point, even though they are demonstrably not overweight according to medical criteria. The main beneficiaries of what Germov and Williams (1996) call this ‘epidemic of dieting women’ are the companies which annually sell $30 billion worth of diet foods in America alone. It seems that about 90 per cent of diets fail, so the benefits are minimal, and there are medically-related dangers of increased anxiety, lowered metabolic rate, and the potential for malnutrition. It is arguable that binge eating (bulimia nervosa) and self-starvation (anorexia nervosa) are merely extreme extensions of this behaviour, rather than the mental illness diagnosed by some psychiatrists. If so, then dieting is one of the best examples of how one portion of society (girls and women) can be strongly socialized to a norm of behaviour which seemingly has little impact upon another group (boys and men). The psychiatric argument does hold some water, however, because many sufferers share particular character traits, such as low self-esteem and/or perfectionism, and many are treatable by antidepressant medication.

Eating Habit and Academic Performance

There are some factors that affect what people eat which have implications for students‟ achievement in schools. These factors may be based on cultural, individual, social, religious, economic, environmental and political influences (Naillon, 2017). Chinyoka (2014) found that good nutrition can help reduce the destructive effects of poverty on intellectual development when it is developed early in life. Eating a healthy diet can help students feel better, cope with stress, and perform better in classroom (Centre for Disease Pretvention and Control, 2018). Flect (2016) argues that children afflicted by sustained poor nutrition are at greater risk for obesity, mental and emotional health problems, and a failure to thrive academically linking mental confusion and dullness to poor dieting. Breakfast consumption has been shown to enhance academic performance by improving cognitive function such as memory and neural efficiency and school breakfast programs have been shown to reduce absenteeism and tardiness (Carroll, 2014). Ross (2010) in his studies discovered that students that ate breakfast

2.2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Implicit Theories of Weight

Until recently, limited research had investigated the impact of implicit beliefs about malleability in health-relevant domains. Recent work finds that incremental theories within health-relevant domains predict motivation and achievement in ways comparable to academics and other domains (e.g., Lyons, Kaufman, & Rima, 2015). We argue that an examining the effect of implicit beliefs on people’s eating behavior is particularly important. Obesity is correlated with a range of negative health (e.g., Kenchaiah et al., 2002) and psychological (Puhl & Heuer, 2009) consequences. Unhealthy diets play a central role in the increase in waistlines and in the etiology of life-threatening diseases (e.g., O’Donnell et al., 2010; Stampfer et al., 2000; Voorrips et al., 2000). Despite public health recommendations to limit the consumption of high-calorie, high-fat foods (e.g., Flock & Kris-Etherton, 2011), people often struggle with resisting tempting foods in the service of long-term health and appearance-based goals (e.g., Junger & VanKampen, 2010; Fishbach, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2003). Thus, maintaining a healthy diet requires self-regulation in the face of tempting high calorie temptations. Drawing upon work suggesting that incremental theories of personal attributes benefit goal striving and achievement (see Burnette et al, 2013 for review), we suggest that views of weight as malleable are likely to help individuals resist tempting high-calorie foods and, thereby, help them maintain healthy eating habits. Past research suggests that, just as people differ in the degree to which they view intelligence and personality to be malleable, people also differ in the degree to which they view weight as malleable (Burnette, 2010). Some people view weight as changeable, perhaps through diet and exercise—an incremental view of weight. Others hold more of an entity view of weight, characterized by the belief that one’s weight is largely fixed and unchangeable perhaps due to genetics or health issues. Implicit theories of weight are consequential, with incremental theorists predicting that they will respond with more effortful and less avoidant strategies if they face a dieting setback more than entity theorists (e.g., Burnette, 2010). Additionally, an intervention designed to encourage an incremental theory of weight helped dieters avoid weight-gain in the wake of dieting setbacks (Burnette & Finkel, 2012). The present investigation extends this research to examine the relationship between implicit theories of weight, self-efficacy and healthy eating behavior. Specifically, we examine whether a view of weight as malleable predicts greater nutrition self-efficacy than does a fixed view of weight. Further, we examine whether this difference in self-efficacy predicts reduced consumption of a high-calorie, high-fat food. In the same way that a view of intelligence as malleable inspires motivation and persistence within academic environments (e.g., Dweck,1999), we expect that a view of weight as malleable will inspire motivation to resist tempting high-calorie, high-fat foods and, insodoing, maintain healthy eating practices. To our knowledge, the relationship between implicit theories of weight and eating behavior has yet to be explored. One recent study provides preliminary support that such beliefs might be consequential. More specifically, Dar-Nimrod, Cheung, Ruby, & Heine (2014) found that participants who read a message suggesting that obesity is genetically caused (consistent with an entity theory of weight) tended to consume more of a high-calorie food than control participants. Although participants’ naturally-occurring implicit theories of weight was not measured in the above study, the finding is consistent with our argument that perceptions of weight as malleable should relate to healthy eating behavior as evidenced by lower consumption of unhealthy foods.

social cognitive theory

The theoretical underpinning of this study is founded on the conceptions of the social cognitive theory propounded by Albert Bandura in the 1960s. The theory strongly lays emphasis on one’s cognition. It contends that human development is influenced, in part, by environmental agents. It suggests that the mind is an active force that constructs one’s reality selectively, encodes information, performs behavior on the basis of values and expectations and impose structure on its own actions. It is through an understanding of the processes involved in one’s construction of reality that enables reality that enables human behavior to be understood, predicted and changed. Family socio economic background or structure is an environmental agent that impacts human development and therefore student performance. In view of the theory, the student’s academic performance is a product of interaction of his personality, his academic environment and his socio economic background.