Exploring Teachers’ Creativity in Improvisation of Instructional Materials in the Teaching and Learning of Chemistry: Implication for the 21st Century Learners

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Teaching and learning of Chemistry in this 21st century is facing a number of unprecedented challenges especially in resource-constrained environments, where the teachers’ creativity becomes the main stem for providing instructional materials. This study examined teachers’ creativity in improvisation of instructional materials in the teaching and learning of Chemistry in secondary schools. The study was guided by four research questions and employed the descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised 34 Chemistry teachers in 30 government approved secondary schools in Nsukka Education zone of Enugu State, Nigeria. A sample of 20 Chemistry teachers used for the study was drawn using simple random sampling technique. One instrument “Chemistry Teachers’ Improvisation of Instructional Materials Questionnaire (CTIIMQ)” was used for data collection. Data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer all the research questions. The findings of the study revealed that, the extent of improvisation of instructional materials for the teaching and learning of chemistry was very low . The findings also revealed that using improvised materials during the teaching sessions proved very helpful but was greeted with a number of challenges among which are; lack of creativity and the skill to design, time constraint, limited skills in improvisation, cost of locally sourced materials, lack of support, lack of policy statement to encourage teachers, large class size, among others. Finally, the findings also revealed some possible ways to ameliorate these challenges. Based on these, recommendations were made.