Instructional Scaffolding and Academic Performance of Economics Students in Public Senior Secondary Schools, in Obio-Akpor LGA, Rivers State

This research work sought to investigate instructional scaffolding teaching strategy on academic performance in Economics among public senior secondary school students, in Obio-Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State. It was guided by four research questions and four hypotheses. The study adopted the quasi-experimental design, particularly the pretest posttest non-equivalent control group. The population consisted of 23,853 economics students in public senior secondary school; a simple random sampling technique was used to select two schools with a sample size of 140 senior secondary school II (SS II) students from four intact classes. The instrument for data collection was a structured multiple-choice question ‘Economics Assessment Test (EAT)’ made up of 20 items as administered to students. The validity of the instrument was by a face and content validity; its reliability was determined using the Pearson Product Moment Co-efficient (PPMC) with a reliability index of 0.79 and 0.80 respectively. The experiment group was taught using instructional scaffolding strategy while the control group were taught using discussion method. The data generated was analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer research questions while ANCOVA to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the findings, the result revealed that there is an improvement in students’ academic performance when taught using instructional scaffolding strategy than discussion method. Hence, the researcher recommends this teaching method to teachers at all level, to apply instructional scaffolding approach in teaching to enhance academic performance in both internal and external examinations.