Evaluation of the Extent of Constructivism Application in Lesson Delivery among Rivers State Teachers: Implication for Educational Reform

Abstract

This paper evaluated the extent to which the constructivist approach is applied in classroom lesson delivery by basic education teachers in Rivers State and the implications for Educational reforms in Nigeria. The population of the study is 7010 senior basic education teachers in Rivers State. The Krejcie and Morgan formula was used to sample 365 (175 males and 190 females) respondents from the Rivers South-east senatorial district for the study. From the sample size, 168 teachers were drawn from rural areas and 197 were from urban areas of the study. A self-developed questionnaire titled “Teachers Self-assessment on Application of Constructivist Approach (TAACA) TAACA was used for data collection. The instrument was given facial validation by experts and a reliability of 0.71 was obtained using the Kuder-Richardson Formula (KR-21). Mean, standard deviation was used to answer research questions while t-test was used to test the hypotheses. The study, among other findings, revealed that there is a significant difference between the extent to which teachers in urban and rural areas apply constructivism in lesson delivery. Thus, the paper recommends the retraining of teachers in the rural areas through workshops and identifies some implications of the study on educational reforms in Nigeria.