Teachers’ Attitude and Gender Factor as Determinant of Pupils’ performance in Primary Science

Abstract

Teachers are regarded as the basic tools in education and curriculumimplementations. The quality of any nation’s education is determined by the qualities of the teachers and their attitude to the profession. This paper seeks to examine the influence of the teachers’ attitude and gender factor on the academic performance of the primary schools pupils. Fifty science teachers were randomly selected from seventy (70) primary schools out of the ninetyseven (97) primary schools in ondo west local Government in ondo state and two hundred pupils were randomly selected and used for the same study. Two instruments were used to collect data, the Teachers’ attitude questionnaire (TAQ) and Primary science achievement test (PSAT) .The research design adopted for this study was survey design. The reliability of the instrument was 0.78 and 0.84 by using crombach alpha and k-21 respectively. Pearson moment product correlation coefficient was used to analyze the instruments. The result indicated that there exists a significant relationship between teachers’ attitude and pupils’ performance in primary science. The result also indicated that there exists no significant relationship between the performance of pupils taught by male and female teachers inprimary science. Recommendations were made on how to promote furtherdevelopment of primary science teaching and learning in Nigeria.Key words: Attitude, Gender, Performance, Nigeria