Effects of Constructivist teaching Approach on Secondary School Students’ Geography Achievement in Jos North LGA of Plateau State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study has investigated the effects of a Constructivist Instructional Approach on senior secondary (ii) school students’ geography achievement in Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State, Nigeria. The study adopted the Quasi-experimental research design and random sampling method to select the sample of 110 students from the population of 859. The sample consisted of 46 students in the experimental group, 22 male and 24 females, and 64 students in the control 41 male and 23 females. Intact classes of two schools were used for the study. The research instrument was the Geography Achievement Test (GAT) that was adopted from the past questions of WAEC and NECO SSCE 2015 Gat was validated by three experts from the University of Jos in the department of science and technology education. A reliability coefficient of 0.73 was established through the Guttman split-half coefficient using SPSS 22. Two research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the null hypotheses were tested at α 0.05 level of significance using t-test, ANOVA and ANCOVA. Findings from the study revealed that there was a significant difference in the posttest score of the experimental and control group, in favour of the experimental group. The null hypothesis was rejected because (p ≤ 0.05). Furthermore, the study revealed that there was no significant score difference between male and female students of the experimental group that received the treatment on constructivist learning approaches. Based on the outcomes of the study, few recommendations were made.