The effect of mastery learning strategy on student's academic performance in Junior Secondary School (JS2) Social Studies in Akwa-Ibom State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of mastery learning strategy on students' academic performances in Junior Secondary (JS 2) Social Studies in Akwa-Iborn State. The design adopted for the study was pre­test posttest quasi-experimental study which involve non-equivalent control group. The study was conducted in Akwa-Iborn State, Nigeria and 399 students' drawn from four (4) public secondary schools in Uyo local government area took part in the study. Purposive sampling technique was used in selecting students from four (4) public secondary schools. Social Studies performance test (SSPT) was used as an instrument to generate data and the data gathered was analyzed using descriptive statistics that takes care of mean, standard deviation and analysis of covariance. The results from the findings indicated that mastery learning was the most effective when taught the concept of Social Studies compared with conventional strategy. The study revealed that mastery learning strategy facilitates students' retention better than conventional learning strategy. Implication of the findings was that mastery learning is seen as highly effective and recommendations are that mastery learning should be encouraged for use by teacher in place of the conventional learning strategy. Also government should organized seminars and conferences for teachers to update their knowledge on the usefulness of innovative teaching in order to be abreast on the effective use of such strategy. The curriculum should be so designed in such a way that enough time is allocated for individual student in order to attain mastery of the learning task.