Abstract:
This study was designed to determine the effect of task instruction sheets on foundry students’ academic performance, interest, retention and skill performance in polytechnics of North Central, Nigeria. This study adopted a quasi-experimental research design. Specifically, the pre-test post-test non-equivalent control group design which involved groups of students in their intact classes assigned to experimental and control group. The sample size for this study was 271 and comprised 236 males and 35 female students in all the intact classes in the participating schools. The experimental group had a population of 138 subjects made up of 116 male and 22 female students while control group had a population of 133 subjects comprising 120 male and 13 female students. Eight research questions were formulated and twelve null hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. The instruments used for data collection for this study were Metal Casting Technology Achievement and Retention Test (MCTART), Metal Casting Technology Psychomotor Test (MCTPT) and Metal Casting Technology Interest Inventory (MCTII). To ensure content validity of the MCTART and MCTPT, tables of specification were built. The MCTART, MCTPT, MCTII, lesson plans as well as the training manual were subjected to face validation by the thesis supervisors and three experts. The MCTART, MCTPT,MCTII were trial-tested to determine their suitability and reliability coefficient which was found to be 0.89 for MCTART using Kuder-Richardson formular 20 (KR-20) approach, 0.76 for MCTPT using Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance, 0.87 for MCTII using Cronbach Alpha method. To collect data, students in both groups were subjected to pre-test before experiment, posttest after the experiment as well as administering of MCTART, MCTPT and MCTII to participants.Mean was used to answer the research questions while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses that guided the study at .05 level of significant. The study found out that task instruction sheet is effective for improving students’ academic performance, retention, interest and skill performance in sand casting. There was a positive effect of gender on students’ academic performance, retention, interest and skill performance in sand casting favoring boys. The study found out that there were significant interaction effects of treatments and gender on Foundry students’ academic performance, retention, interest and skill performance in sand casting. It was therefore, recommended among others that Foundry lecturers/ teachers should adopt the use of task instruction sheet in teaching sand casting, The National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) should support instructional effectiveness by training teachers on the use of task instruction sheet as well as in design of task instruction sheet lesson plans for use in polytechnics.
