The study investigated the impact of fieldtrips and video-technology on students’ achievement in Social studies in Port Harcourt Local Government Area of Rivers state. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study. The research design adopted for this study was a quasi-experimental design which made use of pre-test, post-test, non-randomized, non-equivalent, control group design. From a population of 6, 240 Social Studies students which are made up of 2, 467 males and 3, 773 females of 13 schools in Port Harcourt LGA, 195 JSS II Social Studies students of three intact classes randomly drawn from three Government co-educational Secondary Schools constituted the sample for the study. The instrument for data collection was an achievement test constructed by the researcher, titled, “Social Studies Achievement Test (SSAT)”. The Social studies Achievement Test (SSAT) is a multiple choice objective test consisting of twenty five (25) items with five options (A-E). The test instrument was validated and had a reliability coefficient of 0.87 through Kuder-Richardson 20 (KR20) formula as a measure of the instrument internal consistency. The study was conducted for seven (7) weeks. The second week for obtaining the pre-test score while the 7th week for posttest scores. The main instruction lasted for four (4) weeks. Mean, standard deviation and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were the statistical tools used for analyses. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The results of the study revealed that the achievement of students taught with field trip was higher than those taught with video technology; however the difference was not significant. Also, it was found out that the combined effect of fieldtrips and video technology on students’ mean achievement was statistically significantly different from the conventional method of teaching Social Studies. Consequently, it was recommended among others that Fieldtrips and Video technology Instructional strategies could be used together by teachers since the finding from this study showed that they could be combined and impact positively on the academic performance of students.
Keywords: Instructional strategy, Social Studies, fieldtrip, video technology
