Effects of Self-Directed Instructional Method on Secondary School Students’ Achievement in Social Studies

Abstract

This paper focused on determining the effects of self-directed instructional method on secondary school achievement in Social studies.  Since Social studies is an area of school curriculum specifically designed for study of man and how he fits into the society by utilizing the necesary attitudes. Values and skills at his reach, there is a need to find out a means of making its classroom interaction more  practical, interesting and students’ centered so that students will no longer be contented to accept what their teacher offers blindly but can learn ways of contributing towards changes. Thus the focus of this paper is to determine the best method(s) of teaching Social studies. The researchers adopted quasi-experimental research design using JSSII students randomly selected into one experimental and one control groups. One research question and one null hypothesis were formulated that guided the study. Data were collected using 34 items test and data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for research question while ancova was used for the null hypothesis. The study revealed that students taughts Social studies using self-directed instructional method performed better with the average mean socre of 83.92 and the standard deviation of 5.81 than the students taught Social studies with conventional instructional method with the average mean socre of 55.76 and the standard deviation of 7.03 and that there is a significant difference between the mean achievement of students  taught Social studies using  self-directed instructional method and those taught with orthodox/traditional methods of teaching. Based on these findings, some recommendations were made.