Effects of Jigsaw Co-operative Instructional Strategy on Senior Secondary Students' Achievement in Civic Education

Abstract

The teaching of Civic Education is core curriculum activity expected to adopt  learner-centred than the teacher-centred pedagogy. Observations have shown that Civic Education teachers in secondary schools only used the conventional strategies in their class room practices regardless of the emergency of research based co-operative instructional strategies such as Jigsaw. Hence, the study, focused on effects of Jigsaw co-operative instructional strategy on secondary school students' achievement in Civic Education. The main purpose of the study was to acertain the effect of Jigsaw cooperaative instructional strategy on students' achievement in Civic Edcuation. One research question and one null hypothesis tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The study was quasi-experimental in nature and adopted non-equivalent, pretest-posttest research design and the area of the study was Onueke Education Zone of Ebonyi State. The population of the study comprised of six thousand, one hundred and two (6,102) senior secondary school two (SSS II) students drawn from the sixty five (65) public secondary schools in Onueke Education Zone of Ebonyi State. The instrument used for data collection was Civic Education. Achievement Test (CEAT), data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for research question, and analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that the mean achievement scores of secondary school students taught Civic Education using Jigsaw co-operative instructional strategy, was higher than the mean achievement scores of those taught Civic Education using conventional strategies. Based on the finding, it was recommended that Civic Education teachers should re-assess their classroom, instructional practice because there is a need for them to shift from instructional practice, which makes learners passive listeners to the practice that engages learners actively in the instructional processes.