SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: Vocational Education

CONTRIBUTORS:

Akamobi, O.G;
Eze, T.I;

ABSTRACT:

The study examined the comparative effectiveness of constructivist and meta-learning teaching methods on students’ academic achievement and retention in Basic Electricity in technical colleges in Anambra State. Eight research questions guided the study and eight null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study was a quasi-experimental design. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 108 students from four technical colleges based on the number of basic electricity students, their age, availability of teaching facilities and professional qualified teachers. Two technical colleges each were randomly selected for the first experimental group and the other two technical colleges for the second experimental group.The experimental group 1 was taught with constructivist teaching method (specifically collaborative instructional approach) while the experimental group 2 was taught using meta-learning teaching method. The instrument for data collection was Basic Electricity Achievement Test (BEAT). The instrument was validated by three experts (two from Department of Technology and Vocational Education and one from department of Measurement and evaluation) from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka). The instrument for the study –BEAT, was given to a sample of 30 NTC II basic electricity students of Government Technical College Ofagbe, Delta State and the data obtained were analysed using Kuder-Richardson 20 (K-R20) formula and was used to determine the reliability of the instrument which yielded reliability co-efficient of 0.87. The data obtained in the study were analysed using mean and standard deviation for research questions and ANCOVA for testing the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result obtained showed that constructivist teaching method had a significant effect on students’ achievement compared to meta-learning teaching method. The study also showed that meta-learning teaching method had a significant effect on students’ retention ability. There was no significant effect of gender on the achievement and retention ability of students when taught with constructivist and meta-learning teaching methods. There was also no interaction effect of gender and teaching methods on achievement and retention ability of students. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that teachers of basic electricity should adopt a teaching method incorporating collaborative instructional approach with meta-learning teaching method in teaching Basic Electricity in order to enhance knowledge mastery and retention among students