EFFECTS OF ACTIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES ON SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE IN MAP READING IN MANGU L.G.A., PLATEAU STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study examined the effects of active learning strategies on secondary school students’ performance in map reading in Mangu Local Government Area of Plateau State, Nigeria. Four objectives, two research questions and two hypotheses were used to guide the conduct of the study. The design employed was quasi-experimental research design particularly the pretest-posttest control group design particularly the pretest-posttest control group design without randomization. The study utilized 59 students as sample for the study, 46 from experimental group and 38 from control group. Map Reading Achievement Test was the instrument used for data collection with a reliability of 0.97. The mean, standard deviation and students’ t-test were used to analyzed the data. The result revealed that the students from both groups performed poorly in the before the intervention. While after the intervention, there was improvement in the students’ performance after the intervention in favour of the experimental group. The result from the hypotheses testing revealed that there is a significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups in favour of the experimental group especially, in the post-test. This implies that active learning strategies improves students’ performance in map reading. The study recommended that active learning strategies be used by geography teachers to teach map reading in secondary school and that geography teachers be trained in the used of these strategies by organizing workshops and in-service training for teaching map reading. It was also recommended that map reading learning materials should be made available by the government to be used in all schools.