Effects of Chickering–Gamson Instructional Strategy on Undergraduate Students’ Achievement in Educational Management Concepts in Federal Universities in South-East, Nigeria

In teaching and learning of Educational Management concepts, both the lecturer and the student have their different roles to play so as to attain the objectives of a given classroom curriculum. It is very important that an appropriate instructional strategy be adopted in teaching Educational Management to improve the achievement of lesson objectives. Across the Universities, performance has been low which has been blamed on the use of inappropriate instructional strategy. This study therefore investigated “effects of Chickering-Gamson instructional strategy on undergraduate students' achievement in Educational Management concepts in Universities in the South-East Zone, Nigeria. Chickering -Gamsonlearning strategy has its base on composite principles which are encapsulated into a constructive model that is learner-centered. Quasi experimental design was adopted involving prettest-posttest non-equivalent control group condition. The target population comprised undergraduate students from Faculties of Education in Universities in the South East Zone, Nigeria. A sample of one hundred and fifty nine (159) students from intact classes was used for the study. The Instrument for data collection was Educational Management Achievement Test (EMAT). The instrument comprised a multiple choice test items numbering thirty four (34). The instrument was validated by three experts; two in Educational Management while one was from Measurement and Evaluation, all from Federal University, Ndufu-Alike Ikwo in Ebonyi State. Item analysis involving Difficulty index and Discriminating power was carried out whereby four (4) items were dropped, leaving 30 items for use. Kuder-Richardson 20 formula (Kr-20) was used to determine the reliability coefficient as 0.91, which showed very high internal consistency. Three research questions were formulated to guide the study and three null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses. Findings from the study showed that: Students in Chickering-Gamson Instructional Strategy group had higher achievement than those in the Lecture Method group; male undergraduate students had a higher mean score than the female students in the Chickering – Gamson Instructional Strategy group; there was no interaction effects of teaching strategies and gender on students' achievement mean score. Hypothesis one (HO1) was significant while hypotheses two (HO2) and three (HO3) were not significant. Based on the findings, it is recommended that Chickering-Gamson Instructional Strategy should be used in teaching Educational Management concepts in the Universities but other undergraduate courses as well