Chapter 1
The Problem

Introduction
In educational institutions, success is measured by academic performance or how well a student meets standards set out by the national government or by the institution itself. In the Philippines, there is a clamour for quality education in higher education due to the generally low performance of tertiary educational institutions. Many reports came out that per quality as characterized of higher education in the Philippines, is manifested by low percentage of graduates passing the board and that the increasing number of teacher education graduate who flunk the annual licensure tests for teacher is continued to alarm the nation (Report in the news item, “Today’s Teachers not Passing Test”, Manila Times). Hence, Clemente (2004) ascribed in her studies that it can be deduced that most tertiary institutions have not successfully produced students armed with quality learning. Performance in schools is however evaluated in a number of ways. For regular grading, students demonstrate their knowledge by taking written and oral tests, performing presentations, passing of homework and participating in any class activities and discussions. At the national level, students are evaluated by their performance on standardized tests like the National Achievement Test which is geared towards the identification of the high and low performing schools in the country through the Mean Percentage Score (MPS) performance of the students. It is believed then that the MPS of each school serves as a primary indicator of the students’ level of learning. If a certain school earns high MPS, it is concluded that their students also have learned a lot while low performing schools indicate students’ lesser learning. However, many experiences ad studies found out that there are also several factors that would account for the student’s grades or performance. No