COMPREHENSION TEACHING AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN THE KEFFI LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF NASARAWA STATE
ABSTRACT
The study looked at the impact of comprehension instruction on the performance of pupils in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa State, Nigeria. The study’s objectives were to determine the difference in performance between students taught comprehension and those who were not taught comprehension in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa state; three research questions and two null hypotheses were proposed in accordance with the stated objectives. The study employed a quasi-experimental research design.
The study had a target population of 12,380 JSSII students from Nasarawa State’s Keffi education zone. The experimental group consisted of fifty-two (52) students, whereas the control group consisted of sixty-five (65) students, for a total of one hundred and seventeen (117) individuals, with seventy-two (72) male and forty-five (45) female students. The pre-test, treatment, and post-test data for the study were obtained using a teacher-created instrument (Test), which included 30 objective test items and a treatment package.
The acquired data was statistically evaluated using descriptive (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics of the independent sample t-test. Among other findings, it was discovered that there was a significant difference in the performances of students taught comprehension and those who were not taught comprehension in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa State, and that there was no significant difference in the extent to which gender difference affects the performance of students taught comprehension in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa State.
Based on the findings, recommendations were made that comprehension teaching be introduced into the teaching of social studies at the secondary school level because it encourages students to successfully acquire and retain the concepts taught to them. Teachers in Nasarawa State’s junior secondary schools should guarantee that their lessons provide equal learning opportunities for both male and female students.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The Study’s Context
Reading skills must be cultivated in addition to listening, speaking, and writing abilities. Reading is essential for learning in all facets of life; people frequently learn something by reading. When people read, they frequently try to comprehend and decipher what they have read. Reading, according to Nunan (2006, p. 69), is a combination of skills that involves understanding sense and deriving meaning from printed words. Reading is a multifaceted activity including the eyes, ears, mouth, and, most crucially, the brain (Brassell & Rasinski, 2008, p. 15).
According to Brown (2001, p. 298), reading skill is best fostered in conjunction with writing, listening, and speaking activities. He also stated that courses designated as reading, your goals would be best met by leveraging on the relationship of abilities, particularly the reading-writing connection. According to Nation (2009, p. 49), reading is both a source of learning and a source of enjoyment.
It can be a goal in and of itself, as well as a means of teaching other goals. Reading, as a source of learning, can help learners establish previously taught vocabulary and grammar, it can help learners learn new vocabulary and grammar, and it can encourage learners to study more and continue with their language studies. Reading may be a source of fun and a way of learning about the world in and of itself. Reading delight can grow as students improve their reading skills and fluency.
Reading is one of the abilities in English that is very significant. There is a concept known as understanding in the context of reading. According to Nunan (2003, p. 68), the purpose of reading is comprehension. The reader is enticed to keep reading because of their comprehension (Caldwell, 2008, p. 175). According to Dias, Montiel, and Seabra (2015, p. 406), the ultimate goal of good reading is comprehension, and many of the components involved in reading comprehension are not specific to written language.
According to Kruidenier (2002, p. 77), reading comprehension entails all of the parts of the reading process mentioned in earlier sections of this review working together. Reading comprehension, according to Brassell and Rasinski (2008, p. 18), is the ability to take information from written text and do something with it that displays knowledge or understanding of that material.
According to the above-mentioned researchers and experts, reading and comprehension are part of the same package, one helps the other, and they are related. Reading is a difficult skill to learn. Knowing the definitions of terms does not assist the reader grasp and comprehend what the students read. According to Westwood (2008, pp. 33-37), there are eight issues with reading comprehension.
They are limited vocabulary knowledge, lack of fluency, lack of acquaintance with the subject matter, text difficulty level (readability), insufficient use of appropriate reading strategies, weak verbal thinking, processing information issues, and challenges recalling information after reading.
Furthermore, Brassell and Rasinski (2008, pp. 55-58) state that teachers must identify the source of the reading comprehension problem. Word recognition as a source of understanding difficulty, fluency as a source of comprehension difficulty, vocabulary and comprehension issues as sources of comprehension problems, and techniques for assessing word-recognition accuracy, automaticity, and prosody in oral reading are all examples.
According to Shehu (2015, p. 93), reading comprehension difficulties occur regularly even in pupils who are proficient in decoding and spelling. This trouble with reading comprehension might occur for a variety of causes. They are vocabulary, working memory, and the absence of extended reading, as well as the type of material.
Despite the kids’ difficulties comprehending the reading texts, reading can influence their achievement. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2000, 8), achievement is a feature of an individual student, and the bulk of variation in achievement occurs among students in the same classroom and between classrooms within the same school.
Being successful in higher education is one strategy to improve one’s chances of getting better jobs in the future. As a result, many university students, particularly undergraduate EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students, must improve themselves in order to be professional future instructors and leaders with strong academic credentials.
Academic accomplishment is determined by the learners’ intelligence and study skills (Ayesha and Khurshid, 2013, p. 23). Several factors influence students’ academic achievement in higher education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2000, pp. 8-24), various factors influence pupils’ academic achievement. They are as follows: kids’ backgrounds, school organization features, teacher credentials, school climate, reading comprehension, and mathematic comprehension.
Academic performance may be essential for students since it will help them in the future. Some positions require new employees to have a high academic attainment or GPA. A higher level of academic achievement is also required to continue the studies. Academic success or academic achievement refers to academic performance as measured by the Grade Point Average (GPA) in the United States (Coutinho, 2007, p. 39). He further adds that GPA is calculated across academic topic areas and semesters, providing a pretty strong indicator of university accomplishment.
Several studies have looked into how the use of comprehension teaching can affect students’ academic achievement. When they are carefully created, implemented, and assessed, comprehension teaching efficiently communicates information and promotes the acquisition and retention of knowledge.
This is consistent with Adoke’s (1997) study on the perceptions of social studies students and teachers on the teaching methods used in junior secondary schools in Nigeria’s northern states, where he discovered that the methods primarily employed in teaching social studies were the lecture and storytelling methods, which serve as a barrier to the implementation of social studies.
This prompted the researcher to conduct this study, effect of teaching comprehension on the performance of students in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa state, Nigeria, to determine whether teaching comprehension will improve students’ performance and be one of the best methods of teaching social studies.
1.2 Problem Identification
Teaching comprehension is an instructional strategy that promotes the development of crucial learning abilities such as critical thinking, problem solving, and the capacity to work constructively with each student by utilizing active reading and comprehension. Properly implemented comprehension instruction can result in increased motivation to study, greater knowledge retention, deeper understanding, and more favorable attitudes about the subject being taught (Collin and Obrain, 2003).
While teacher-centered learning consists of lecture and storytelling, which ignores students’ interests, abilities, and learning styles, and places the teacher as the source of information and knowledge, students are frequently assessed alone without peer interaction before or after the learning process, it is also insufficient in an attempt to provide for the overall development of learner (cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) domains, because the teacher dominates learning cli (Adoke, 1997).
As a result of the teacher-centered instruction, weak and slow learners working individually may give up when they get stocked, delay in completing assignments or skip them entirely, perform poorly in their continuous assessment and placement examination, and engage in malpractice during the examination.
Previous research in Nasarawa State found that teacher-centered instruction dominated teaching and learning, which may have resulted in poor academic achievement in the previous placement examinations results of 2013-2014, with just 30 percent pass in social studies, which is not encouraging (Nasarawa State Ministry of Education, 2014).
The persistence of these issues among social studies students compelled educators to seek ways to promote teaching and learning among students, based on the assumption that when comprehension instruction is incorporated into teaching and learning, it may help to improve students’ academic performance in social studies.
1.3 The Study’s Objectives
The following are the study’s objectives:
assess the difference in performance between pupils taught understanding and those not taught comprehension in Nasarawa junior secondary schools
investigate the extent to which gender differences effect the performance of students taught comprehension in Nasarawa junior secondary schools
Compare the performance of students taught comprehension in Nasarawa’s rural and urban junior secondary schools.
1.4 Research Issues
The research questions listed below would be addressed:
What is the difference in performance between students taught understanding and those who are not taught comprehension in Nasarawa state junior secondary schools?
To what extent do gender disparities effect the performance of students taught comprehension in Nasarawa state junior secondary schools?
What discrepancies exist in the performance of students taught comprehension in Nasarawa state’s rural and urban junior secondary schools?
1.5 Theories
The study was guided by the following proposed research hypotheses:
There is no substantial difference in performance between students taught understanding and those who are not taught comprehension in Nasarawa state junior secondary schools.
There is no statistically significant difference in the extent to which gender differences effect the performance of students taught comprehension in Nasarawa state junior secondary schools.
1.6 Importance of the Research
This study, titled effect of comprehension teaching on student performance in junior secondary schools in Nasarawa state, Nigeria, will aid teachers, schools, students, school head teachers, curriculum planners, and other researchers in improving the quality of teaching social studies.
The study’s findings will be extremely beneficial to teachers by providing them with useful information on the best teaching strategy to use when teaching social studies. Incorporating project-based learning into secondary education will also improve teacher collaboration with students who have diverse skills, come from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and are English language learners.
It is also crucial in the sense that teachers will be able to see how project-based education can assist students prepare for state tests and meet state standards by facilitating learning of content knowledge as well as reasoning and problem-solving ability.
1.7 The Study’s Scope
The influence of comprehension instruction on student performance in junior secondary schools was studied in Keffi L.G.A. Nasarawa State. The students of junior secondary school (JSSII) were used as subjects, and the major variables of the study are to determine the performance of students taught social study use teaching of comprehension and those taught with the conventional method, the extent to which gender difference affects the performance of the student taught comprehension, and the performance of students taught comprehension in rural and urban junior secondary schools in Nasarawa state.
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COMPREHENSION TEACHING AND STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN THE KEFFI LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF NASARAWA STATE