Boosting Students' Interest In Science In Secondary Schools: The Role Of Teachers' Academic Qualification And Teaching Experience
Joseph Endurance Ayibatonye
Department of Integrated Science, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt
Chinda, Worokwu
Department of Chemistry Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt
Keywords: students, interest, Basic Science, qualification, experience secondary schools
Abstract
The study adopted the Ex-post Facto research design. This was used to examine the influence of the independent variables on the dependent variables. The population for the study consisted of all the students and Basic Science teachers in the (UBE) section of public secondary schools in Rivers State. The sample for the study consisted of six hundred (600) basic science students and one hundred (100) basic science teachers from the junior secondary section (UBE) selected through a stratified random sampling technique. Thirty (30) junior secondary schools were selected for the study. The simple random sampling technique was further used to select 20 students from each of the 30 selected schools, giving a total of 600 students. Instruments adopted for data collection include the Science Interest Scale (SIS) and Student Achievement scores. The student interest scale has two sections: A and B. Section A measures how students’ interest in science is sustained through the teacher's characteristics. It contains ten items in a modified Likert-type format. Responses in this part range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." Items in this part were adopted from Joseph (2019) students’ interest scale. The students’ achievement was determined by the scores of the students in basic science in the UBE classes. The information was gathered from the study's chosen schools' principals or anyone authorised to release the results. The results of the students did not require further testing for reliability because, according to Gable (1986), any score obtained from the original source does not require any further re-validation. The data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics. The mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, and the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 significant levels: