Group Essay Writing: Facilitating Team Learning Using ICT for Life Long Education

Abstract

Many tertiary level students do not use the Internet to develop as critical readers, writers and thinkers. The study set out to assess the impact of group essay writing method using ICT on the writing skills of B.Sc. year II science education students of the Technical Teacher Training Programme (TTTP) of Yaba College of Technology, Yaba, Lagos. The population was made up of 260 B.Sc. II TTTP students. The study sample comprised all 40 B.Sc. II Science Education students. The design of the study is quasi-experimental which involved the use of two group pre-test, post-test design in an intact class for data sourcing. Three research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. Data were collected using three essay writing achievement tests in GS 207-Humanities 1, after exposing the sample to some topics on Humanities in the Internet. Data were analyzed using Means, Standard Deviation and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). The findings showed that the group with ICT used data conferencing to edit and modify their write up simultaneously and compared their results whereas the group without ICT used the traditional method of writing individual essays. The ICT group also performed significantly better than the non ICT group in writing, reading and thinking tasks. Based on the findings the following recommendations were made among others that schools should empower youths with IT skills and integrate ICT into mainstream education and training through teacher training and retraining. ICT should therefore be made compulsory in the school curriculum from primary through secondary to tertiary levels for lifelong learning in Nigeria