Biology Teachers Awareness And Utilization Of Innovative Teaching Strategies In Senior Secondary Schools In South West Nigeria

So many innovative teaching strategies have been experimented with by people in the educational field and discovered to positively influence students’ academic performance when appropriately utilised. Unfortunately, students still perform below expectation in Biology, hence, the notion that teachers are not using varied forms of teaching strategies to tackle the difficulties associated with teaching and learning. This study investigated biology teachers’ awareness and utilisation of selected innovative teaching strategies in senior schools in South-west, Nigeria. The objectives of the study were to determine: (i) the level of Biology teachers’ awareness of innovative teaching strategies; (ii) level of utilisation of innovative teaching strategies in Biology classroom and, the influence of (iii) gender (iv) academic qualification (v) year of teaching experience on Biology teachers’ level of awareness and utilisation of the teaching strategies; and (vi) problems associated with the use of selected teaching strategies.rnA descriptive research of the survey type was adopted for the study. All science teachers in senior secondary school, South-west of Nigeria made up the population. The target population were all teachers taking biology in senior secondary school, South-west of Nigeria, while the sample comprised 622 biology teachers purposively selected from Ekiti, Osun, Oyo and Lagos States. A researcher designed questionnaire with reliability coefficient of 0.84 was used to collect data from the respondents. Frequency and percentage, t-test and Analysis of variance were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance.rnThe findings of the study were that:rni. Biology teachers (98.0%) are highly aware of the selected innovative teaching strategies;rnii. less than half (44.0%) of the teaching strategies were frequently utilized by Biology teachers;rniii. the least utilised strategies were the Z-A approach (15%), Jigsaw (15.5%), Mnemonic-word-words approach (21.5%) and Mind map (25.3%);rniv. gender had no significant influence on either the Biology teachers’ level of awareness or on their utilisation of teaching strategies;rnv. academic qualification had no significant influence on Biology teachers’ level of awareness but significantly influenced the level of their utilisation of teaching strategies (F(1,560)=2.142, p<0.05);rnvi. there was a significant difference among less experienced, experienced and highly experienced Biology teachers on their level of awareness of innovative teaching strategies, in favour of the highly experienced teachers F(2,549)=4.639,p<0.05;rnvii. years of teaching experience had no significant influence on Biology teachers’ level of utilisation of teaching strategies; andrnviii. problems associated with inadequate utilisation of the innovative teaching strategies include: non-availability of teaching resources, strategies being demanding and stressful, poor motivation for teachers, absence of in-service training for teachers, and students’ non-commitment to extra effort needed.rnThe study concluded that the use of innovative teaching strategies by Biology teachers was low even though they were highly aware of such strategies. This implies that the Biology students will be denied the benefits attached to the use of innovative teaching strategies. The study recommended that utilisation of innovative teaching strategies should be encouraged.

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