Influence of Teachers’ Pedagogical Competencies on Junior Secondary School Students’ Performance in Social Studies in Kontagora, Niger State, Nigeria (Published)
This empirical paper emphasizes on pedagogical competence of teachers which means teacher’s understanding of learning materials, design and implementation of learning, evaluation of learning outcomes, and the development of learners to actualize different potentials and in turn enhance their students’ performance in social studies. Descriptive survey research designed was used. The population of this study consists of 771 teachers in public junior secondary schools in Kontagora LGA, Niger state, Nigeria. The simple random sampling technique was adopted. The sample size stood at 263. A questionnaire: Influence of Teachers’ Pedagogical Competencies on Junior Secondary School Students’ Performance in Social Studies (ITPCJSSSPSS) was used for data collection. Two research questions were answered and two hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics while hypothesis was tested using chi-square. The finding reveals that teachers’ pedagogical competencies in lesson plan and classroom competence; including students’ performance are very closely related and important concepts for teachers to improve their performance. However, several factors can limit teachers’ pedagogical competencies such as teacher factor, societal factor and poor school resource utilization. This paper provide recommendation for training and retraining of teachers, this will enable them develop their lesson plan competence and classroom assessment competence and in turn enhance students’ performance in subjects matters especially in social studies
Keywords: Students performance, lesson plan competence and class assessment competence, teachers’ pedagogical competence