EVALUATION OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL CHEMISTRY CURRICULUM IN KOGI STATE, NIGERIA.

Abstract

The study evaluated the implementation of the senior secondary school chemistry curriculum in Kogi State, Nigeria. Three research questions and one null hypothesis guided the study. Descriptive survey research design was adopted. The population of the study comprised all the 122 chemistry teachers and 1,594 SS11 chemistry students in the 254 public senior secondary schools in Kogi State. The sample size for the study comprised 93 chemistry teachers and 320 SS11 chemistry students sampled from 32 co-educational secondary schools in the area using multistage sampling procedure. Two questionnaires were used in the study namely; Evaluation of the Implementation of Senior Secondary School Chemistry Questionnaire (EISSSCQ) for Teachers and Evaluation of the Implementation of Senior Secondary School Chemistry Questionnaire (EISSSCQ) for Students respectively. Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the internal consistency of the instruments with reliability coefficients of 0.89 and 0.84 respectively. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while-test was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. Findings of the study revealed that the implementation of chemistry curriculum is facilitated by the availability of chemistry curriculum in the schools, teachers also used recommended instructional methods such as lecture method, discussion method, concept mapping, laboratory, simulation and games, and cooperative learning among others. Evaluation techniques used by the teachers to implement chemistry curriculum are essay writing, take home and practical assignments, among others. The results also revealed that there was no significant difference between the mean responses of teachers and students on the evaluation techniques used by chemistry teachers to implement chemistry curriculum. Necessary conclusions were made.