A Critical Review on the Impact of Instructional Media in Secondary School Students

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

 Background to the Study

Effective secondary school teaching should stress the use of activity-oriented methods and instructional strategies that will help students reach their learning goals (Adediran 2014). Secondary school education is concerned with instilling creative reflective, competency relational, analytic, and decision-making abilities and competence in the learner in order to produce a functioning and productive citizenship, which is a significant focus of secondary school education (Mezieobi and Mezieobi 2008). Kanno (2001) defines teaching as “the passing on or imparting of desirable knowledge to a passive learner recipient who must or is required to regurgitate the rote memory acquired and stored knowledge.The secondary school curriculum is so extensive that it prepares students for full adult lives in a complicated and dynamic environment. This type of preparation is consistent with, (2004), dispositive curriculum, which states that the global requirements for education in recent times include promoting life-long learning, re-emphasizing the quality of learner experiences, reorganizing subjects into key learning areas in order to develop a broad knowledge base, and developing in the learner the ability to think critically and be innovative. According to Enu and Esu (2010), this type of education provides the system’s products with the ability to adapt to societal goals, economic realities, and future life obstacles. It is widely acknowledged that kids require opportunities to grow their faith, self-expression, and confidence. They must also be able to learn about themselves, the society problem, and the larger communities in which they reside.

Understanding is gained by teaching; it entails a teacher, a student, subject content, and instructional resources. This is because, in order to promote learning, the teacher engages in activities such as talking, demonstration, and instruction, among other things; these are the various strategies for promoting learning (Adediran 2014). All of the materials used by teachers to assist students in their learning processes are referred to as instructional media; they are the means by which effective teaching and learning can be achieved. According to Obara and Okoh (2005), instructional strategies and materials are “all the things the teacher uses to interactively enhance, motivate, and facilitate teaching and learning in order to ensure the achievement of a set of objectives.” The success of educational materials and practices is determined by how well they satisfy the needs of the instructor and pupils. Instructional tactics and resources are chosen based on the concepts of providing accurate materials that will enhance and support the curriculum, while also taking into account the students’ interests, talents, and maturity levels. Teachers should be encouraged to employ instructional tactics in whatever manner they can since they make learning more real and relevant (Buseri and Dorgu 2011).Teachers must employ a variety of instructional media tactics to guarantee a student-centered approach in the classroom in order to foster creativity, innovation, and critical thinking in pupils. As a result, it is critical that the primary consequences of instructional methodologies are represented in classroom practice.

Emerging study findings appear to indicate that focused instructional practices are becoming increasingly popular at the secondary school level of education in Nigeria (Ogundare, 1985). (Osakwe 2009). These educational techniques include problem solving, active practice engagement of learners in the teaching process, and an emphasis on the process of learning rather than the outcomes of learning. According to Osakwe (2009), some of these tactics and approaches are classed as conventional and creative. According to Osakwe (2009), instructional methods labeled as conventional are generally those routine, well-known ones that teachers utilize the most. They are often teacher-centered, with little or no student activities. These include traditional teaching methods such as lecturing, story-telling, recitation, and so on; on the other hand, creative tactics are those that are considerably more recent and are primarily learner-centered. Questioning, inquiry/problem solving, role-playing, and dramatization are examples of these (Adediran 2014). As a result, Kanno (2001) observed that teaching aids in the learning of others (the learners). In a teaching-learning situation, the instructor is not a taskmaster or an autocrat dispensing encyclopedic information. According to Akinlaye (2002), meaningful leadership is a student-led activity in which the student is allowed democratic flexibility to learn by doing it himself by his activity participation dedication and show of his intellectual integrity and ability for independent judgment.

According to Mezieobi and Mezieobi (2008), educational researchers and advances have revealed a variety of creative instructional tactics in secondary schools that may be applied with similar ease in the classroom. According to Bransford, Brown, and Cockry (2000), some of these tactics are as follows: learning cycle-based instructional strategy, project-based learning approach, case-based teaching strategy, just-in-time teaching instructional strategy, and so on. All of these strategies require students to complete a series of activities that require complementary thinking and problem-solving approaches. When the teacher teaches based on the strategies, the different activities in most of these instructional strategies are designed to appeal to different learning style preferences; all students are taught partly in a manner they prefer, which leads to an increased comfort level and willingness to learn.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Teaching is the communication of facts, ideas, and information from the instructor to the pupils in a systematic order or technique. During this procedure, instructional media, also known as teaching aids, are displayed to make training more relevant, clear, and entertaining to pupils. With a high prevalence of pupils performing poorly in chemistry, biology, and physics topics at the senior secondary certificate test, there is a broad perception that scientific education is not accomplishing the desired objectives. This issue has taken on a perilous dimension in all Nigerian secondary institutions. The inability of the educational system to offer necessary and suitable teaching-learning aids in order to enhance students’ academic performance is a major source of worry for the government, educational institutions, and other concerned individuals. According to Obioha (2006) and Ogunleye (2002), there are insufficient resources in Nigerian secondary schools to utilize during teaching-learning process. They went on to claim that most of the ones that are available are in bad condition. It is considered that if suitable instructional material are made available to schools and used effectively in the teaching-learning process, higher results may be obtained. Therefore, is against this backdrop that this research is to critically review the impact of instructional media in secondary school students.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The general objective or main objective of this study is to critically review the impact of instructional media in secondary school students . The specific objectives are:

1. To establish the rationale for utilizing instructional media in secondary schools in Nigeria.
2. To investigate the extent at which instructional aids are made available in Senior Secondary School.
3. To determine the impact of utilizing instructional media in teaching secondary school students in Nigeria .
4. To identify the challenges facing the use of instructional media for effective teaching and learning in secondary schools in Nigeria.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The following are some of the questions which this study intends to answer:

1. What are the reasons for utilizing instructional media in secondary schools in Nigeria?
2. What is the extent at which instructional aids are made available in Senior Secondary School?
3. What are the impact of utilizing instructional media in teaching secondary school students in Nigeria ?
4. What are the challenges facing the use of instructional media for effective teaching and learning in secondary schools in Nigeria?

 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

Findings from this study will be significant to students, teachers, curriculum planners, ministry of education and the society at large. To the students, the effective use of instructional resources will enable them to effectively learn and retain what they have learnt and thereby advancing their performance in the subject in question because, learning is a process through which knowledge, skills, habits, facts, ideas and principles are acquired, retained and utilized; and the only means of achieving this is through the use of instructional resources. The use of instructional resources will give the learner opportunity to touch, smell or taste objects in the teaching and learning process. Consequently, knowledge passed unto the students at difference levels of educational instructions should be well planned and properly allied with relevant instructional resources for clarity and comprehensibility. The study will enhance teachers‟ teaching effectiveness and productivity. The use of instructional materials provides alternative channels of communication which a teacher can use to compress information and make them more vivid to his learners. It also provides the teacher with interesting and compelling platforms for conveying information since they motivate learners to want to learn more and more. Also, by providing opportunities for private study and reference, the learner’s interest and curiosity are increasingly stimulated. As a result, teacher who makes use of appropriate instructional materials to supplement his teaching will help enhance students’ academic performance. Finally, this research work will contribute to knowledge as a reference material for scholars in the research field.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This study is designed to assess the availability and use of instructional media on the academic performance of secondary school students in Nigeria. The study aims at finding whether variable like; instructional materials, teachers’ improvisation and use of instructional media are related to students’ academic performance. The study is however delimited to selected secondary schools in Idah local government area in Kogi State.

 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

Like in every human endeavour, the researchers encountered slight constraints while carrying out the study. The significant constraint was the scanty literature on the subject owing that it is a new discourse thus the researcher incurred more financial expenses and much time was required in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature, or information and in the process of data collection, which is why the researcher resorted to a limited choice of sample size covering only selected secondary school in Idah Local Government Area in Kogi State. Thus findings of this study cannot be used for generalization for other secondary school in other States within Nigeria. Additionally, the researcher will simultaneously engage in this study with other academic work will impede maximum devotion to the research. Finally, respondent could not return all the questionnaires distributed to the researcher and this has only made the researcher to only work with the ones that got to him. Howbeit, despite the constraint encountered during the research, all factors were downplayed in other to give the best and make the research successful.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

The following terms were used in the course of this study:

Instructional resources: the tools used in educational lessons, which include active learning and assessment. Basically, any resource a teacher uses to help him teach his students is an instructional material.

Learning: is the act of acquiring new or modifying and reinforcing existing knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, or preferences which may lead to a potential change in synthesizing information, depth of the knowledge, attitude or behaviour relative to the type and range of experience.

Secondary school: is the next step up from primary school. Secondary schools are often called high schools in the United States. In Britain, secondary schools may be public schools, grammar schools or comprehensive schools.

Teaching: the process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings, and making specific interventions to help them learn particular things.