Christened, Renamed, Reformed but No Changes: The Way Out

Abstract

Despite series of reforms in Nigerian science education curriculum, it is disheartening that achieving the stated objectives in the curriculum have become a mirage. One of the major problems associated with this is the implementation stage of the curriculum. Therefore, the thrust of the study is to investigate the effects of three variables namely: quality of the curriculum, school location and teachers’ gender as the predictors of basic science teachers’ classroom practices. The research adopted an ex post facto research design and a total number of one thousand five hundred primary four pupils with five hundred and forty teachers participated in the study in three local government areas, Kwara state, Nigeria. The results from the findings revealed, that there is a positive multiple correlations among the three variables on the basic science teachers’ classroom practices. Hence, three variables were significant predictable joint effect on teachers’ classroom practices. The results also showed that school location has the highest contributing effect. However, quality of the curriculum is the most significant variable that can be used to predict basic science teachers’ classroom practices. Various suggestions and recommendations were given.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n4p470