Students’ Perception of Teachers’ Pedagogical Skills and its Influence on their Attitude towards Science: Implication for Science, Technology and Engineering Careers

The study assessed students' perception of teachers' pedagogical skills and its influence on attitude towards science in Owerri, Imo state. The study adopted an ex-postfacto research design using a sample of 400 senior secondary II science students. Two researcher developed instruments were used for data collection namely Students' Perception of Teachers' Pedagogical Skill Questionnaire (SPTPSQ) and Students' Attitude Towards Science Questionnaire (SATSQ). The instruments were face validated. Using Cronbach Alpha method, reliability indices of the two instruments were established. Percentages, mean and standard deviation were used to provide answers to the research questions while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the study revealed that students perceived that science teachers have low pedagogical skills. Also, students' perception of the teachers' pedagogical skills had significant influence on their attitude towards science. This finding implicates students' career choices in science, technology and engineering at higher institutions in that their poor attitude towards science as a result of teachers' poor pedagogical skills will result to their poor attitude towards science, technology and engineering courses. Based on these findings, the researcher recommended that science teachers should endeavour to acquire appropriate pedagogical skills to enable the students develop positive attitudes towards science, technology and engineering careers at high level of education