Effects of Guided Discovery Instructional Method on Secondary School Studnets’ Achievement in Social Studies

Abstract

The study sought to find out the effect of guided discovery instructional method on secondary school students’ achievement in Social Studies. Two research questions and one null hypothesis were posed to guide the study and were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study employed the pre-test, post-test control group design. Specially, the design of the study is non equivalent control group design. The area of the study was four selected public secondary schools in Ikwo Local Government Area of Ebonyi State. Simple random sampling technique was used to select four (4) public secondary schools that have existing intact classes with the sample size of one hundred and fifty-one (151) junior secondary school II (JSS II) students who made up the population of the study in Ikwo Local Government Area. The instrument used for data collection was Social Studies Achievement Test (SOSAT) constructed by the researchers with initially thirty-five (35) multiple-choice items with option A-D. The items of the instrument were validated by two experts from Social Studies Education and one other specialist in Measurement and Evaluation in Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki for relevance, clarity, proper wording and adequacy of items in addressing the objectives of the study and were further treated to item analysis of difficulty index and discrimination power. After item analysis, six (6) out of the thirty-five (35) items were dropped, leaving behind twenty-nine (29) question items. The instrument with twenty-nine (29) question items were treated to determination of reliability using thirty-five (35) junior secondary school II (JSS II) students selected from Abakaliki High School in Ebonyi Local Government Area of Ebonyi State who were not part of respondents and were considered equivalent to the targeted population and Kinder Richardson 20 (KR-20) statistics. By this analysis, a reliability coefficient of 0.98 was obtained which showed a high internal consistency; thereby making the instrument suitable for use for the study. The data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for all research questions while analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at an alpha 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that students in experimental group performed better than those in the control group, (ii) female students used for experimental group obtained higher mean score (73.053) than their male counterparts who had mean score (71.218), and (iii) there was significant interaction effects between methods and location on the mean achievement of students in Social studied since the value of F-sig (0.134) is less than the value of F-cal (2.261). Based on the findings, some recommendations were made to improve the achievement level of students in Social Studies in schools.

Keywords: Social Studies, Guided discovery and Achievement