Basic Science and Technology Teachers’ Attitude and Intention-To-Use AI for Lesson Planning and Delivery: The Narratives in Oyo State, Nigeria

Basic Science and Technology (BST) is a subject that emanated from Integrated Science, which aims at laying solid foundation in scientific skills and thoughts. The aim is to provide learners with the initial practical frameworks which are inevitable for understanding scientific concepts, principles, theories and laws. It is also to serve as pre-requisites for future study of core science subjects at the senior secondary and tertiary institution, needed for the societal development. Due to the adoption of the generalized teaching system at pre and primary education levels, whereby qualified but non-professional teachers teach BST, there have been low functional and ineffective teaching and learning of BST at the early years educational levels. This has been denying the learners from enjoying BST, and bring in their innovative ideas into their education. As a result of this, the idea of adopting ICT in BST education evolves, whereby ICT can be used to demystify the teaching and learning of BST. The latest ICT in education around the world today is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has been adopted to solve several educational challenges around the world but there is no empirical evidence about the pre and primary school BST teachers’ attitude and intention to adopt AI in lesson planning and delivery in Nigeria, hence this study. Descriptive survey design was adopted and multi-stage sampling approach was used to select 318 teachers (public school – 32.1%; private school – 59.4% and demonstration school – 8.5%) in Oyo State. Data gathered were analyse using descriptive and inferential statistics. It was found out that early years teachers had positive attitude towards lesson planning and delivery among others. The study has paved way for teacher trainers in Nigeria to decide ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘with what’ to train early years teachers on the use of AI for BST lesson planning and delivery, which will improve the effectiveness of BST education.